3 - Place under Pressure: Reading John Tripp's Wales

Summary

John Tripp (1927–86) was one of the key figures in the 1960s explosion of Anglophone Welsh poetry known as the ‘Second Flowering’. In his 1989 study of Tripp's life and work, fellow Welsh poet Nigel Jenkins neatly suggests something of Tripp's literary character when he begins his book by recounting that Tripp ‘used to say’:

I was born in Bargoed in 1927 […] and I want to know why. This affirmation, undermined characteristically by the niggle of doubt, draws together the two abiding preoccupations of John Tripp's writing: a passionate, if critical, devotion to his native country, and in the later poems, a sometimes tormented struggle for meaning in a universe devoid, for him, of any sign of benevolent grace.

The ‘Second Flowering’ took place from around 1964 and included the work of Anglophone Welsh poets living both in and beyond Wales. Tripp fitted into the latter category until his return from London in 1969. The restoration of Wales's Anglophone poetic life in the 1960s crucially reversed its collapse of the previous decade. As Tony Conran explains: ‘For a year or so after the end of the Second World War in 1945, Anglo-Welsh poetry of the thirties and forties was still very much in place. […] Yet ten years later the scene was in ruins.’ These ruins perhaps found their most potent symbol in the deaths of Dylan Thomas and Idris Davies, both in 1953. However, in a defining article published in 1967, Meic Stephens was able to observe that English-language Welsh poets had, by the end of 1966, become ‘as numerous as blackberries in the woods’. Given remarks in the Anglo-Welsh Review in the opening years of the 1960s which suggested that Wales's English-language literary life appeared to be in decline or even in danger of extinction, this was an astonishing turnaround. In large part this was down to Stephens himself, who had, in 1965, established the periodical Poetry Wales in which the Second Flowering was to be substantially fostered. However, standing alongside this was the pioneering work of the monthly London Welshman magazine which had, under the editorship of Tudor David, introduced regular English-language poetry to its pages in the early 1960s.