occupying new territory the potentially catastrophic results of writers promoting political ideology, and lan-
guage,as a consequence of this, becoming debased. As George Steiner memorably
put it, the fate of the German language offers the most extreme case in point:
Gradually, words lost their original meaning and acquired nightmarish definitions.Jude,
Pole,Russecame to mean two-legged lice, putrid vermin which good Aryans must squash,
as a party said, ‘like roaches on a dirty wall’. ‘Final Solution’,endg ̈ultige L ̈osung,cameto
signify the death of six million human beings in gas ovens.
The language was infected not only with these great bestialities. It was called upon
to enforce innumerable falsehoods, to persuade the Germans that the war was just and
everywhere victorious. As defeat began closing in on the thousand-year Reich, the lies
thickened to a constant snowdrift. The language was turned upside down to say ‘light’ where
there was blackness and ‘victory’ where there was disaster.^94
The personality presented in the war poems of Llywelyn-Williams is that of a
responsible, self-composed, experienced man; his is the muse of reason contained
within meticulously crafted poems. The poet’s calling was not a source of particular
pleasure to him: ‘I must admit that I have never got much pleasure whilst trying to
writepoetry.Idonotlike,inthefirstplace,thepainfulprocessofwriting.’^95 He
refers on more than one occasion to the creative conflict. His comment that ‘every
poem is a battle between the poet and words and syntaxes, an attempt to achieve
complete and appropriate expression of a specific experience or feeling’^96 echoes
what T. S. Eliot in ‘East Coker’ described as ‘the intolerable wrestle|With words
and meanings’.^97 His words suggest that Llywelyn-Williams certainly did not take
his calling as a poet lightly: he was only too aware of the social importance—in a
non-partisan and universal sense—and seriousness attached to such a calling. He
could quite easily have agreed with Eliot on another occasion, when he wrote in
‘Little Gidding’ in 1942 that ‘our concern was speech, and speech impelled us|To
purify the dialect of the tribe’.^98 Llywelyn-Williams’s war poems—unhysterical,
balanced, objective—represent his attempt to reclaim for the language some of its
purity and integrity and help establish trust in it once more in the twentieth century.
(^94) George Steiner, ‘The Hollow Miracle’, inLanguage and Silence: Essays 1958–1966(London:
Faber, 1967), 122–3.
(^95) Llywelyn-Williams, ‘Holi: Alun Llywelyn-Williams’, 21.
(^96) Llywelyn-Williams, ‘Sgwrs rhwng Alun Llywelyn-Williams a Bedwyr Lewis Jones’, 120.
(^97) T. S. Eliot, ‘East Coker’, inThe Complete Poems and Plays(London: Faber, 1969), 179.
(^98) Eliot, ‘Little Gidding’, ibid. 194.