Poetry
Williams's poetry shows many influences from William Wordsworth and Walt Whitman to Welsh hymns and the strict alliterative metres of traditional Welsh poetry, known as cynghanedd.
Williams belongs, first of all, to the Welsh tradition of the bardd gwlad (=folk poet), a poet who served his locality by celebrating its life and people in verse.
But he was also a poet inspired by the mystic revelation he had as a youth about the unity of the whole of humankind. This revelation was realised in the cooperative and harmonious living he witnessed amongst the farming communities in the Preseli Hills and reflected in feelings of belonging, knowing, and a desire that people should live together in peace – constant themes in his poetry. It inspired some of his greatest poetry, including Mewn dau gae (=In two fields) (1956), perhaps his greatest poem of all, which celebrates the very moment of this revelation.
Other well-known poems by Williams include Cofio (=Remembering) (before 1936), Y tangnefeddwyr (=The peacemakers) (1941), Preseli (1946), and Pa beth yw dyn? (=What is it to be human?) (1952).
Read more about this topic: Waldo Williams
Famous quotes containing the word poetry:
“I can never get people to understand that poetry is the expression of excited passion, and that there is no such thing as a life of passion any more than a continuous earthquake, or an eternal fever. Besides, who would ever shave themselves in such a state?”
—George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)
“Do you know how poetry started? I always think that it started when a cave boy came running back to the cave, through the tall grass, shouting as he ran, “Wolf, wolf,” and there was no wolf. His baboon-like parents, great sticklers for the truth, gave him a hiding, no doubt, but poetry had been born—the tall story had been born in the tall grass.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)
“Painting gives the object itself; poetry what it implies. Painting embodies what a thing contains in itself; poetry suggests what exists out of it, in any manner connected with it.”
—William Hazlitt (1778–1830)