First World War
On graduation Cynan joined the Welsh Student Company of the RAMC, serving in Salonika and France serving initially as an ambulance man and then as the company's pastor. His wartime experience had a profound effect on his poetic works, to such an extent that Alan Llwyd claims that Cynan, not Hedd Wyn, is the premier Welsh war poet of the First World War. Hedd Wyn's poems relating to the war were written before he had enlisted and he was killed before he could recount his experience of the war in his muse. Cynan, however, gives the best descriptions of the gritty atrocities of war, and the impact of war on a man's body as well as his spirit.
Read more about this topic: Albert Evans-Jones
Famous quotes containing the words world and/or war:
“No one is to blame. It is neither their fault nor ours. It is the misfortune of being born when a whole world is dying.”
—Alexander Herzen (18121870)
“I have agreed to go into the service for the war ... [feeling] that this was a just and necessary war and that it demanded the whole power of the country; that I would prefer to go into it if I knew I was to die or be killed in the course of it, than to live through and after it without taking any part in it.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (18221893)