The monumental tradition of stained glass has so closely tied its creator to the architect that as an art of its own, with a unique territory for the imagination to explore, it is as yet scarcely known. But things are changing, and the Arts Council’s travelling exhibition of modern stained glass (which will visit most of the principal cities of England and Wales during 1961) is an encouraging sign of the emergence of an independent art, freed from the near-monopoly of the commercial firms who up to now alone had the resources for its complex and expensive manufacture. And the recent exhibition at the Arthur Jeffress Gallery in London of the work of Patrick Reyntiens revealed an artist who combines a superb mastery of the technical problems of this most exacting of crafts with a rich and original imagination.

The stained glass artist can rarely know the freedom the painter or the sculptor enjoys. His work is almost always commissioned, usually by clergy, and he is often expected to conform to structural patterns as well as to conventions of design. His failures are the most permanent of all, as a glance at almost any church built during the last hundred years or so will clearly prove. So vigorous a discipline is not necessarily a limitation, and the windows of Chartres or Fairford are there to declare it. Since the war, intelligent commissions (not, alas, from any Catholic source) have enabled artists such as John Piper to design windows on the heroic scale—as in the baptistery of Coventry Cathedral and in the chapel of Eton College.

A small anthology from the region of Cardiff claims to be of Anglo-Welsh verse. How can one tell Anglo-Welsh from Anglo-English verse? The blurb suggests ‘a Celtic sensitivity for the pattern of word and image’, but this seems to me to be taking refuge in the undefinable. This kind of sensitivity, without which a poet is not a poet, is the same the whole world over and what determines it is the extent to which his mind is moulded by the language and past of his people or moved to write by the problems of their present. In the context, as an example of the first, that is of a poet whose imagery and language seem to continue the life of Welsh poetry, I would give Vernon Watkins, who does not appear here and must be outside the terms of reference; and of the second, R. S. Thomas whose verse in the wider technical sense is hardly more Welsh than Edmund Blunden’s but who is concerned deeply with the scene and the soul of Wales. If the meaning I have tried to give to the term is accepted, in this anthology the poems of Glyn Jones fall into the first category, ‘Nonconformist’ by Robin Moffet into the second, but the majority could have been written by Englishmen in England. I sound harsher than I mean to: there are some good Anglo-English poems among them. There are more Anglo-Welsh poems in Mr Conlan’s volume from the same publisher and they are the best ones in it.