Beginnings
The first-known poem in English by a Welshman was Hymn to the Virgin written c.1470 by Ieuan ap Hywel Swrdwal. Well into the nineteenth century, English was spoken by few in Wales, and prior to the early twentieth century there are only three major Welsh-born writers who wrote in the English language: George Herbert (1593–1633) from Montgomeryshire, Henry Vaughan (1622–1695) from Brecknockshire, and John Dyer (1699–1757) from Carmarthenshire. Such Welsh poets who wrote in the English language tended to imitate the conventions of English verse and only in translations from the Welsh did a national voice succeed in making itself heard. Some see the beginnings of true Anglo-Welsh poetry in the work of poets such as Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–89), Edward Thomas (1878–1917), and Wilfred Owen (1893–1918).
Read more about this topic: Anglo-Welsh Poetry
Famous quotes containing the word beginnings:
“[Many artists], even the greatest ones, are not sure of their own existence. So they search for proof, they judge, they condemn. It strengthens them, it is the beginnings of existence. They are alone!”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)
“These beginnings of commerce on a lake in the wilderness are very interesting,—these larger white birds that come to keep company with the gulls.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Let us, then, take our compass; we are something, and we are not everything. The nature of our existence hides from us the knowledge of first beginnings which are born of the nothing; and the littleness of our being conceals from us the sight of the infinite. Our intellect holds the same position in the world of thought as our body occupies in the expanse of nature.”
—Blaise Pascal (1623–1662)