The author and journalist Simon Heffer considers Wolf Solent "to be the finest novel by an Englishman in the 20th century". However, Heffer also notes that Powys' name remains little known. [68] Bibliography [ edit ] London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd., 1929; From The Ground Up Collected Papers Of A. R. Powys by A.R. Powy. London: Dent, 1937. Review by George Steiner in the New Yorker, 2 May 1988". {{ cite magazine}}: Cite magazine requires |magazine= ( help) G.Wilson Knight Surely it depends on the state of mind in the western world altering. If our present consciousness persists, it’s likely that the authors you named as being famous should get what I think is probably undue acclaim and that Powys should not have his due. But when and if the wider consciousness alters — Powys may perhaps even help to alter it, or it may perhaps alter our appreciation of Powys — that is the kind of way you want to look at the problem, I think. When we have a consciousness which is aware of the imponderables all around us instead of the consciousness which is dependent on the scientifically factual, then there may be a change. Powys and Emma Goldman: The Letters of John Cowper Powys and Emma Goldman, ed. David Goodway (2008)

Denis Lane, "The Elemental Image in Wolf Solent", in In the Spirit of Powys: New Essays, ed. Denis Lane. London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1990, p. 57; and "Elementalism in John Cowper Powys's Porius". Papers on Language and Literature, 17, no. 4 (1981), pp. 381–404.

Porius: A Romance of the Dark Ages (1951), restored texts 1994 and 2007. Two versions available at [7] One of Powys's most important works, his Autobiography (1934), describes his first 60 years. While he sets out to be totally frank about himself, and especially his sexual peculiarities and perversions, he largely excludes any substantial discussion of the women in his life. [89] The reason for this is now much clearer because we now know that it was written while he was still married to Margaret, though he was living in a permanent relationship with Phyllis Playter. Powys was born in Shirley, Derbyshire, in 1872, the son of the Reverend Charles Francis Powys (1843–1923), and Mary Cowper Johnson, granddaughter of Dr John Johnson, the cousin and close friend of the poet William Cowper. [3] He came from a family of eleven children, many of whom were also talented. The family lived in Shirley between 1871 and 1879, briefly in Dorchester, Dorset and then they moved to Montacute, Somerset, where Charles Powys was vicar for thirty-two years. [4]

It is not surprising that John Cowper Powys, after he moved to Corwen, decided to begin a novel about Owain Glyndŵr, as it was in Corwen that Glyndŵr's rebellion against Henry IV began on 16 September 1400, [65] when he formally assumed the ancestral title of Prince of Powys at his manor house of Glyndyfrdwy, then in the parish of Corwen. In September 1935, Phyllis Playter had suggested he should write a historical novel about Owain Glyndŵr. [66] An important aspect of Owen Glendower are historical parallels between the beginning of the 15th century and the late 1930s and early 1940s: "A sense of contemporataneousness is ever present in Owen Glendower. We are in a world of change like our own". [67] The novel was conceived at a time when the " Spanish Civil War [note 1] was a major topic of public debate" and completed on 24 December 1939, a few months after World War II had begun. [68]To be considered a truly great novelist it is no good (unless you are James Joyce, who breaks every rule) to write just one or two great novels.

His sense of encompassing nature and the living ever-present past, his power to convey curious states of mind, the beauty of his best writing, the exciting, erotic and cosmic scenes with which he alleviates his cosmic conceptions, could only come from a man possessed of superlative talent, genius, or (the word is inescapable with Powys) daemon’. — Times Literary Supplement Owen Glendower (1940) The Tiresias reference seems to me so much deeper here than in Eliot because we have felt the whole of Tiresias in that passage. John Cowper, as perhaps Leonardo before him, or as Goethe in certain very key passages, is both man and woman, and has this breath-taking equity of judgement, this unbelievable impartiality of judging sensation. It is one of his most important works and writer J. B. Priestley suggests that, even if Powys had not written a single novel, "this one book alone would have proved him to be a writer of genius." [90] And it "has justly been compared to the Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau." [91]I want in selfish delight to end by looking at two passages in which John Cowper Powys’s genius is such, and of so immediate a quality that one would want to read them from the rooftops: the kind of passages where everything I've said fades into total insignificance, and one is just left with the desperate question, “why does anybody need convincing?” My role tonight is a slightly ambiguous one. I’m trying to be of use to the Society by speaking as it were from the margin, or a little bit from the outside. Let me just try and initiate some thoughts on the difficult, yet obvious subject of why we should be meeting at all, which I don't think should be taken for granted. I think the fact that we're meeting reflects a rather complicated situation. A Glastonbury Romance (1933) online text of the 1934, 5th UK impression. This is a cut version, but less so than later editions. Politically, Powys described himself as an anarchist and was both anti-fascist and anti-Stalinist: "Powys already regarded fascism and Stalinism as appalling, but different, totalitarian regimes". [22]