occupying new territory However challenged and discredited the concept may be—the way music was
abusedin the Nazi death camps is probably the worst example—his belief in the
redeeming qualities of music provided Llywelyn-Williams with a source of personal
and artistic salvation.^84
Llywelyn-Williams was able to reassess his role as a poet after the fundamental
doubts that assailed him as a result of the trauma of war. Just as he had celebrated
his having survived the war in ‘The First Christmas of Peace’, the final poem of the
‘War’ section inPont y Caniedydd,soheexpressedhisbelief,in‘ThePoetofthe
World as it Is’, that poetry in general should celebrate the fact that ‘Life goes on, and
God requires of a poet|praise of life’s wonder and its mystery.’^85 In another poem
in which he explicitly addresses the function of the poet, ‘The Poet’s Penance’, he
claims that ‘dreams are at the heart of the world’ and that ‘God has laid upon the
poet|the pain of living them in words’.^86 Asinthecaseof‘BalladofthePhantoms’
and ‘On a Visit’, both ‘The Poet of the World as it Is’ and ‘The Poet’s Penance’
belong to that prolific year, 1954, and in an essay published during the same year
he again attempted to define the role of the poet and reassert his own creative
function: ‘The poet attends on mystery.... That’s what is common to major poets
at all times in every civilization and every religion, that they bear witness to the
continuous and permanent cycle of life’s destruction and renewal.’^87
This shift in emphasis, away from the topical and toward the timeless, as seen
in particular in the most mature war poems contained inPont y Caniedydd—as
opposed toCerddi 1934–1942—helps explain the greater awareness of the Welsh
poetic canon in the later poems. The allusions were occasional in the 1942 volume,
but by 1956 they are regular and intentional, and point towards his substantial
development as a poet. Llywelyn-Williams’s relationship with his indigenous liter-
ary tradition ultimately helped to defend him from nihilism by providing him with
a wider historical and cultural context within which to locate his experience of the
horrors of war; as Greg Hill has pointed out in his comparative study of both poets,
the absence of a similar resource for Alun Lewis placed him in a far more precarious
(^84) His former friend and colleague Dyfnallt Morgan expressed his reservation about Llywelyn-
Williams’s belief in ‘Cofio Alun Llywelyn-Williams’, in Tomos Morgan (ed.),Rhywbeth i’w Ddweud:
Detholiad o Waith Dyfnallt Morgan(Llandysul: Gwasg Gomer, 2003), 221–2: ‘Out of a civilization
that elevated the fine arts...arose the abhorrence of totalitarianism. We have heard of extermination
camp guards in Germany coming home after a day of butchering to enjoy a night in their cosy homes
reading Goethe, weeping over Rilke’s poems, intoxicated by Schubert’s music....I cannot for the life
of me take comfort in man’s creativity. The other side of the coin is his ability and tendency to destroy.
Like the Jewish writer, George Steiner, I can only think of a means of redemption for man from his
wretched condition in transcendental terms.’
(^85) Llywelyn-Williams, ‘The Poet of the World as it Is’, trans. Clancy, inLight in the Gloom, 153.
(^86) Llywelyn-Williams, ‘The Poet’s Penance’, trans. Clancy, ibid. 147.
(^87) Llywelyn-Williams, ‘Diwedd y Byd’, inNes Na’r Hanesydd? Ysgrifau Llenyddol(‘Closer than the
Historian? Literary Essays’) (Dinbych: Gwasg Gee, 1968; essay 1st pub. 1954), 150.