Dafydd AP Gwilym

Extract

To get to Wales is a morning’s journey from London. Yet to reach the Welsh that is the language of the poets is one of the rarer English achievements. Returning anthropologists are apt to say that the poetry of the llbangi is unrivalled, but there are few who will be impressed, since Ubangi is not usually found on the English curriculum. There is perhaps a chauvinism of the mind that looks for some connection between great art and national prestige. The lesser breeds may be conceded a memorable folk-tale, but the growth of imperialism has given a quantitative, and therefore false, importance to the artist who uses the imperial language—English, French or German.

Ideally, the particularism of the artist who springs from a small nation should be absorbed by the unity of a larger tradition. But poetry is not at its best following!a flag, even a federal one. The conflict between the local language and the wider world of Europe did not in the 14th century relegate the former to a parochialism that has been the lot, for instance, of Welsh poetry since the Reformation. Welsh poetry has indeed survived, and most gloriously, but, as cut off from the fertilising contact with Europe, it has too often seemed moralising, repetitive and trivial—the inevitable results of any sort of isolation.

For Dafydd ap Gwilym, an older contemporary of Chaucer, there was no conflict between Wales and the world outside. He wrote in the traditional Welsh metres (though not usually in the strictest) which had become exactly formulated by generations of professional bards, themselves an enclosed body demanding an allegiance to canons of procedure and expression which we associate nowadays with the Law Society rather than with poets.