Poetry Powys's first published works were poetry:
Odes and Other Poems (1896),
Poems (1899), collections which have "echoes […] of
Tennyson,
Arnold,
Swinburne, among contemporaries, and of
Milton and
Wordsworth and
Keats". These were published with the assistance of his cousin Ralph Shirley, who was a director of William
Rider and Son the publisher of them. In the summer of 1905 Powys composed "The Death of God" an epic poem "modelled on the blank verse of Milton, Keats, and Tennyson" that was published as
Lucifer in 1956. There were three further volumes of poetry: ''Wolf's Bane
(1916), Mandragora
(1917) and Samphire'' (1922). The first two collections were published by Powys's manager G. Arnold Shaw. An unfinished, short narrative poem "The Ridge" was published in January 1963, shortly before Powys's death that June. In 1964 Kenneth Hopkins published
John Cowper Powys: A Selection from his Poems and in 1979 the Welsh poet and critic
Roland Mathias thought this side of Powys worthy of critical study and published
The Hollowed-Out Elder Stalk: John Cowper Powys as Poet. Belinda Humfrey, suggests that "[p]erhaps Powys's best poems are those given to Jason Otter in
Wolf Solent and Taliessin in
Porius."
The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse (1973) edited by English poet
Philip Larkin contains "In A Hotel Writing-Room" by Powys.
Novels Wessex novels While he was a famous lecturer and published a variety of both fiction and non-fiction regularly from 1915, it was not until he was in his early fifties, with the publication of
Wolf Solent in 1929, that he achieved critical and financial success as a novelist. This novel was reprinted several times in both the United States and Britain and translated into German in 1930 and French in 1931. In the Preface he wrote for the 1961 Macdonald edition of the novel Powys states: "
Wolf Solent is a book of Nostalgia, written in a foreign country with the pen of a traveller and the ink-blood of his home".
Wolf Solent is set in Ramsgard, based on
Sherborne, Dorset, where Powys attended school from May 1883, as well as Blacksod, modelled on
Yeovil, Somerset, and
Dorchester and
Weymouth, both in Dorset, all places full of memories for him. In the same year
The Meaning of Culture was published and it, too, was frequently reprinted.
In Defence of Sensuality, published at the end of the following year, was yet another best seller. Before
Wolf Solent there had been four earlier apprentice novels:
Wood and Stone (1915),
Rodmoor (1916), the posthumous
After my Fashion (1980), which was written around 1920, and
Ducdame (1925).
Wolf Solent was the first of the so-called Wessex novels, which include
A Glastonbury Romance (1932),
Weymouth Sands (1934) and
Maiden Castle (1936). Powys was an admirer of Thomas Hardy, and these novels are set in Somerset and Dorset, parts of Hardy's mythical Wessex. The American scholar Richard Maxwell described these four novels "as remarkably successful with the reading public of his time".
Maiden Castle, the last of the Wessex novels, is set in
Dorchester, Thomas Hardy's
Casterbridge. Powys intended it to be a rival of Hardy's
The Mayor of Casterbridge. All the same, despite his indebtedness to the Victorian novel and his enthusiasm for Hardy,
Walter Scott and such lesser figures as
Ainsworth, Powys was clearly a
modernist. He has affinities also with
Fyodor Dostoevsky,
Friedrich Nietzsche,
Walter Pater,
Marcel Proust,
Carl Jung,
Sigmund Freud,
D. H. Lawrence,
James Joyce and
Dorothy Richardson. hill fort has an important role in Powys's novel
Maiden Castle It is clear from Powys's diaries that his new-found success was much helped by the stability that his relationship with Phyllis Playter gave him and her frequent advice on his work in progress. So much so that with regard to
Weymouth Sands Powys believed "she ought to have her name on this book’".
A Glastonbury Romance sold particularly well in its British edition, though this was of little avail as it was the subject of an expensive libel case brought by
Gerard Hodgkinson, the owner of the
Wookey Hole Caves, who felt himself identifiably and unfairly portrayed in the character of Philip Crow. According to Powys, this novel's "heroine is the
Grail", and its central concern is with the various myths, legends and history associated with Glastonbury. Not only is
A Glastonbury Romance concerned with the legend that
Joseph of Arimathea brought the Grail, a vessel containing the blood of Christ, to the town, but the further tradition that
King Arthur was buried there. Furthermore one of the novel's main characters, the Welshman Owen Evans, introduces the idea that the Grail has a Welsh (Celtic), pagan, pre-Christian origin. The main sources for Powys's ideas on mythology and the Grail legend are
Sir John Rhys's
Studies in the Arthurian Legend,
R. S. Loomis's
Celtic Myth and Arthurian Romance, and the works of
Jessie Weston, including
From Ritual to Romance.
T. S. Eliot's
The Waste Land is another possible influence. A central aspect of
A Glastonbury Romance is the attempt by John Geard, an ex-minister now the Mayor of Glastonbury, to restore Glastonbury to its medieval glory as a place of religious pilgrimage. On the other hand, the Glastonbury industrialist Philip Crow, along with John and Mary Crow and Tom Barter, who are, like him, from Norfolk, view the myths and legends of the town with contempt. Philip's vision is of a future with more mines and more factories. John Crow, however, as he is penniless, takes on the task of organising a pageant for Geard. At the same time an alliance of
Anarchists,
Marxists, and
Jacobins try to turn Glastonbury into a commune.
Welsh novels ,
Corwen, locally known as Mynydd-y-Gaer, the hill fort where Powys completed
Owen Glendower on 24 December 1939. It is also an important setting in
Porius. While
Welsh mythology was already important in
A Glastonbury Romance and
Maiden Castle it became still more so after he and Phyllis Playter moved to
Corwen, Wales, in 1935, first in the minor novel
Morwyn or The Vengeance of God (1937). Another important element in
Morwyn, is condemnation of animal cruelty, especially
vivisection, a theme also found in
Weymouth Sands (1934). As a result, some writers have seen Powys as a forebear of the modern
animal rights movement. In 1944, Powys wrote an anti-vivisection article for Leo Rodenhurst's
The Abolitionist, a paper published by the
British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection. Powys was also associated with the
National Anti-Vivisection Society, where he met Evalyn Westacott, author of
A Century of Vivisection and Anti-Vivisection (1949), who cited Powys arguments against vivisection, which Powys came to see as the worst of all crimes. There then followed two major historical novels set in Wales,
Owen Glendower (1941) and
Porius (1951). The first deals with the rebellion of the Welsh Prince
Owain Glyndŵr (1400–1416 CE), while
Porius takes place in the time of the mythic King Arthur (499 CE). However, Arthur is a minor character compared with the Welsh Prince Porius and the King's magician
Myrddin (
Merlin). In both works, but especially
Porius, Powys makes use of the mythology found in the Welsh classic
The Mabinogion.
Porius is, for some, the crowning achievement of Powys's maturity, but others are repelled by its obscurity. It was originally cut severely for publication, but in recent years two attempts have been made to recreate Powys's original intent. 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, 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. 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". The novel was conceived at a time when the "
Spanish Civil War was a major topic of public debate" and completed on 24 December 1939, a few months after
World War II had begun.
Porius is set mainly in Corwen. The events take place in the week of "October 18, to October 25, A.D. 499", during a historical period when, Powys claims, "There appears to be an absolute blank, as far as documentary evidence goes, with regard to the history of Britain". This was in fact a time of major transition in the history of Britain, with the replacing of Roman traditions with
Saxon rule and the conversion of the British to Christianity. There are again, as with
Owen Glendower, parallels with contemporary history: "The Dark Ages and the 1930s are the periods of what Powys, in
Yeatsian phrase calls 'appalling transition'." and there was a clear possibility of
another "Saxon" invasion, when Powys began writing Porius in 1942. In prefatory comments probably written about 1949, as the
Cold War began, Powys suggests: As we contemplate the historic background to [...] the last year of the fifth century [sic], it is impossible not to think of the background of human life from which we watch the first half of the twentieth century dissolve into the second half. As the old gods were departing then, so the old gods are departing now. And as the future was dark with the terrifying possibilities of human disaster then, so, today, are we confronted by the possibility of catastrophic world events. Powys also saw Glyndŵr's rebellion taking place at the time of "one of the most momentous and startling epochs of
transition that the world has known". Just as the landscape of
Dorset and
Somerset and the characters' deep personal relationships with it had been of importance in the great
Wessex novels, so the landscape of Wales was now significant, especially that of the Corwen region. The landscape and the intimate relations that characters have with the elements, including the sky, wind, plants, animals, and insects, have great significance in all Powys's works. These are linked to another major influence:
Romanticism, especially
William Wordsworth and writers influenced by Wordsworth such as
Walter Pater. Powys also admired
Goethe and
Rousseau. Words such as
mysticism and
pantheism are sometimes used in discussing Powys's attitude to nature, but what he is concerned with is an ecstatic response to the natural world, epiphanies such as Wordsworth describes in his "
Ode: Intimations of Immortality", with an important difference that Powys believes that the ecstasy of the young child can be retained by an adult who actively cultivates the power of the imagination. Some have compared this to
Zen and such contemplative practices, and for Powys, and the protagonists of his novels who usually resemble him, the cultivation of a psycho-sensuous philosophy is as important as the Christian religion was for an earlier generation.
Late novels More minor in scale, the novels that followed
Porius are marked by elements of fantasy.
The Inmates (1952) is set in a madhouse and explores Powys's interest in mental illness, but it is a work on which Powys failed to bestow sufficient "time and care". Glen Cavaliero, in
John Cowper Powys: Novelist, describes the novels written after
Porius as "the spontaneous fairy tales of a
Rabelaisian
surrealist enchanted with life", and finds
Atlantis (1954) "the richest and most sustained" of them.
Atlantis is set in the
Homeric world. The protagonist is Nisos, the young son of
Odysseus, who plans to voyage west from
Ithaca over the drowned
Atlantis. Powys final fiction, such as
Up and Out (1957) and
All or Nothing (1960) "use the mode of science fiction, although science has no part in them".
Non-fiction Autobiographical 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. 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. 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." And it "has justly been compared to the
Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. John Cowper Powys was a prolific writer of letters, many of which have been published, and kept a diary from 1929; several diaries, including this one, have been published. Among his correspondents were the novelists
Theodore Dreiser,
James Purdy,
James Hanley,
Henry Miller and
Dorothy Richardson, but he also replied to the many ordinary admirers who wrote to him.
Philosophy Periodically, over almost 50 years, starting with
Confessions of Two Brothers in 1916, Powys wrote works that present his personal philosophy of life. These are not works of philosophy in the academic sense; in a bookstore the appropriate section might be
self-help. Powys describes
A Philosophy of Solitude (1933) as a "short textbook of the various mental tricks by which the human soul can obtain […] comparative happiness beneath the normal burden of human fate". Powys's various works of popular philosophy may seem mere potboilers, written to help his finances as he worked on his novels, but critics like Denis Lane, Harald Fawkner and Janina Nordius see in them insight into "the intellectual structures that form the metastructures of the great novels". These works were frequently bestsellers, especially in the United States.
The Meaning of Culture (1929) went through 20 editions in Powys's lifetime.
In Defence of Sensuality, published at the end of the following year, was yet another bestseller, In the next 30 years he published essay collection,
The Enjoyment of Literature (1938) (
The Pleasures of Literature in the UK), three studies of writers,
Dorothy Richardson (1931),
Dostoievsky (1947), and
Rabelais (1948), and journal essays on various writers such as
Theodore Dreiser,
Marcel Proust,
James Joyce, and
D. H. Lawrence. There is also a work on
John Keats, part of which was published posthumously, and a study of
Aristophanes that Powys was working on in his later years. Powys's literary criticism was generally well received by reviewers. Morine Krissdottir in her recent biography describes the essays in
Suspended Judgements as "fine criticism". As for
The Pleasures of Literature, the writer Kenneth Hopkins states that "[i]f ever there was a book of criticism for the general reader, this is it." In the 1940s Powys wrote books on two of his favourite authors:
Dostoievsky (1946) and
Rabelais (1948). The latter was particularly praised by some reviewers. The Rabelais scholar Donald M. Frame, for example, in the
Romantic Review, December 1951, describes Powys's translation (only of one fourth of Rabelais) "the best we have in English". A French translation of
Rabelais, by Catherine Lieutenant, was published in 1990.
Reputation Powys is a controversial writer, "who evokes both massive contempt and near idolatry." While
Walter Allen in
Tradition and Dream recognises Powys's genius, he is dissatisfied with what Powys has done with it, seeing his approach to the novel as "so alien to the temper of the age as to be impossible for many people to take seriously". Yet
Annie Dillard sees Powys as "a powerful genius, whose novels stir us deeply." Notable throughout his career is the admiration of novelists as diverse as
Theodore Dreiser,
Henry Miller,
Iris Murdoch,
Margaret Drabble,
James Purdy, and the academic critics
George Painter,
G. Wilson Knight,
George Steiner, Harald Fawkner and
Jerome McGann. The film director
John Boorman wrote in his autobiography of contemplating a movie adaptation of
A Glastonbury Romance early in his career. In 1958, "Powys was presented with the Bronze Plaque of
the Hamburg Free Academy of Arts in recognition of his outstanding services to literature and philosophy". Then on 23 July 1962, aged 90, he gained an honorary degree of
Doctor of Letters in absentia from the
University of Wales at
Swansea, as "patriarch of the literature of these islands". He was nominated for the
Nobel Prize in Literature by
Enid Starkie in 1958 and by
G. Wilson Knight in 1959 and 1962. Powys's works have been translated into French, German, Swedish, Japanese, and other languages. ==Bibliography==