Welsh Poets Quotes

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One such individual was Amos Tutuola, who was a talented writer. His most famous novels, The Palm-Wine Drinkard, published in 1946, and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, in 1954, explore Yoruba traditions and folklore. He received a great deal of criticism from Nigerian literary critics for his use of “broken or Pidgin English.” Luckily for all of us, Dylan Thomas, the Welsh poet and writer, was enthralled by Tutuola’s “bewitching literary prose” and wrote glowing reviews that helped Tutuola’s work attain international acclaim. I still believe that Tutuola’s critics in Nigeria missed the point. The beauty of his tales was fantastical expression of a form of an indigenous Yoruba, therefore African, magical realism. It is important to note that his books came out several decades before the brilliant Gabriel García Márquez published his own masterpieces of Latin American literature, such as One Hundred Years of Solitude.
Chinua Achebe (There Was a Country: A Memoir)
Our master Caesar is in the tent
 Where the maps are spread,
 His eyes fixed upon nothing, 
A hand under his head. 

Like a long-legged fly upon the stream 
His mind moves upon silence.
W.B. Yeats (Celtic Poets: 47 Irish, Scottish and Welsh Poems)
The memory was the only recording instrument of the great part of the population. Deeds and transfers were made permanent by beating young retainers so they would remember. The training of the Welsh poets was not practice but memorizing. On knowing 10,000 poems, one took a position. This has always been true. Written words have destroyed what must have been a remarkable instrument. The Pastons speak of having the messenger read the letter so that he could repeat it verbatim if it was stolen or lost. And some of these letters were complicated. If Malory were in prison, it is probably true that he didn't need books. He knew them. If I had only twelve books in my library I would know them by heart. And how many men had no memory in the fifteenth century? No - the book owned must have been supplemented by the book borrowed and thus by the book heard. The tremendous history of the Persian Wars of Herodotus was known by all Athenians and it was not read by them, it was read to them.
John Steinbeck
Each letter in the Celtic ogham alphabet stood for a tree and its magical associations, and the symbology of trees is a richly poetic presence in Celtic myths. The English poet Robert Graves, in his extraordinary book The White Goddess, deals at great length with the order and meanings of the letters comprising this tree alphabet. He conjectures that the famous Welsh Battle of the Trees (a group of ancient poems preserved in the sixteenth century manuscript The Romance of Taliesin) refers to a druidic battle of words rather than a literal battle of vegetation.
Ellen Datlow (The Green Man: Tales from the Mythic Forest)
Science explains everything. But if it doesn't it hasn't yet.
Dave Lewis (Happy: The Only Way To Look At Life)
Slant Slant or half rhyme appears to be a phenomenon of the last hundred years or so. In fact it is a new definition for strategies poets have always used to build up musical patterns within and across lines. In Welsh poetry, for instance, where Wilfred Owen and Dylan Thomas encountered it, it’s called proest. It widens the focus from full rhyme to consider the range of assonantal or consonantal shapes our ear can recognise as more or less distant relations of the original rhyme sound. In so doing it broadens the range of English, allowing it to equal the rhyming resources of Italian or Russian by drawing on its native reserves of alliteration and vowel-patterning. It also reinforces the element of discovery which is an integral part of rhyme: the surprise of a good slant rhyme will invigorate the listener’s ear just as much as a too-easily anticipated full rhyme tires it.
Linda Anderson (Creative Writing: A Workbook with Readings)
In the same manuscript, the poet further elaborates that “Mi a gefais Awen o bair Karidwen (I received my Awen from the cauldron of Cerridwen).
Kristoffer Hughes (From the Cauldron Born: Exploring the Magic of Welsh Legend & Lore)
Death was so uncompromisingly final; such a cruel ending of dreams, opportunities, learning, and love. Screwing his eyes shut, he fought to keep a grip on his emotions. The words of the Welsh poet, Dylan Thomas, came to him: ‘Do not go gentle into that good night.
Nick Hawkes (The Pharaoh's Stone (The Stone Collection #8))
He does seem to have inherited his father’s taste for troubadour verse – he is reliably recorded as a patron of two of the foremost poets of the day, Cercamon and Marcabru, though the picturesque reports of a Welsh bard, Bleddri, appear to derive from later sources. He was also a considerable patron of other entertainers, which suggests that his court was lively and musical.
Sara Cockerill (Eleanor of Aquitaine: Queen of France and England, Mother of Empires)