"The imagination is a great disturber of theories..." John Cowper Powys Page entry #8

a selection from Obstinate Cymric by John Cowper Powys

"...the sensations of walking for the sake of the pleasure it gives us is a very different thing from noting the impressions left upon us by what we catch sight of on our way to work.  ...The imagination is a great disturber of theories and we must qualify all our conclusions where poetry is concerned by reminding ourselves that there come moments of inspiration when experience or lack of experience matter little.
 
     "Life at such moments is grasped in planetary perspective and with a peculiar kind of emphasis hard to define, an emphasis neither moral nor cynical, neither optimistic nor pessimistic, but so intimately concerned with the unchanging pathos of terrestrial fate that of necessity it appeals to the hand-worker equally with the brain-worker.

     "That is the mysterious emphasis for which the human race has no name but which all men born of women needs must feel."

Huw Menai, 1886-1961

Powys is writing about his admiration for the poetry of Huw Menai, a Welsh coal-miner who wrote poetry which spoke      "...indignantly and wonderfully of all those workers in mine and factory whose reserved, long-seasoned, experienced, and far-sighted revolutionary insight finds it as hard to conceal its contempt for mass-hypnosis and mob-frenzy as for the Machiavellian tricks of the privileged:
     'Once in his cups, he howled aloud
     His true opinion of the crowd.'"


[and from On Seeing Leaves Falling on the Clean-Way--]

"Our hearts are still inexorably weak
For all our conquests of the earth...and late
Tasting our impotence we sadly seek
Some larger scapegoat for the larger Fate;

For we who have the grace to be ashamed
Of our mean actions feel that life would meet
Our prayers half-way if only the nameless named
Had tithe of our pity for the blind and maimed
And the dumb lowlier things about our feet."

"Huw Menai's thoughts [writes Powys] resemble wind-whipt waves breaking one after another on a rocky shore, each particular wave following so hard on the one before it that we might almost say that its choice between breaking into foam and rolling foamlessly forward into the rock pools was conditioned, decided, and predestined by a revolt from, or an imitation of, the choice made by its predecessor.  ...A reader can never be quite certain whether it will be a pagan "Tarot card" or one from the other pack that will turn up next."

(The Simple Vision: Poems by Huw Menai, 1945)

  [The above selections are from Chapter 8: The Simple Vision, Obstinate Cymric, by John Cowper Powys, London: Village Press, 1974.  Chapter 8 ("The Simple Vision") was first published in  1946.]