Yr Hen Iaith part 66: A careless poet? Pantycelyn, language and tradition

Jerry Hunter

It’s hard to find two eighteenth-century poets who had a more tangible influence on the development of Welsh-language literature than Goronwy Owen and William Williams Pantycelyn. And they approached poetry in completely different ways.

Branwen Jarvis draws the contrast nicely: ‘[Goronwy Owen’s] concern for literary scholarship, his care for precision and accuracy of expression, are the antithesis of much of Pantycelyn’s approach to writing poetry. Pantycelyn, who was careless of mere words, was both Romantic and utilitarian in his approach[.]’[1]

To state the obvious, words are a poet’s raw material; how can a great poet be ‘careless of mere words’?

Accessible

In the previous two episodes we noted the accessible nature of the language used by Pantycelyn in his hymns. He often wrote in a way heavily influenced by the oral language, but he also mixed linguistic registers, combining dialectal features and more formal word forms in a way which can seem careless at times. Saunders Lewis described the great hymnist’s use of language memorably: ‘Ni pharchai ef eiriau o gwbl ond eu darnio a’u hanafu’ (‘He didn’t respect words at all but rather mangled and maimed them’). 

A similar opinion was expressed long before the twentieth century. Indeed, in 1791, the very year in which Pantycelyn died, Thomas Jones of Denbigh wrote this: ‘Mae’n amlwg fod Mr. Williams yn Brydydd o naturiaeth: ond yn ei ganiadau nid ymestynodd am gywreinrwydd y gelfyddyd’ (‘It’s obvious that Mr. Williams is a poet by inclination: but in his songs he did not strive for the art’s elegance’). That word cywreinrwydd, meaning ‘elegance’, can also be translated as ‘accuracy’. Goronwy Owen was a poet who used words accurately to create complex, elegant compositions. Pantycelyn was not that kind of poet.

Given the huge number of hymns published by Williams, it is no surprise that all of them aren’t of the same quality. And this entire discussion might be entirely unfair; unlike Goronwy Owen who strove to produce classically elegant poems designed to be read, studied and admired, Pantycelyn produced work for use in a practical public sphere; his poems were songs meant to be understood readily and sung easily during communal worship.

Still, as we’ve already suggested in this series, much of his poetry has a freshness and an urgency which makes it great literature. And it was an extremely new kind of literature in its day.

Cynghanedd

As was suggested in the last instalment, Pantycelyn was a versatile writer. He wrote prose as well as verse, and he composed long, epic poetry as well as many short hymns. However, all of his poetry shares one basic formal feature: it is free-metre work, completely devoid of cynghanedd, the complex system of internal line ornamentation which had been used by Welsh poets since the medieval period and was still very much in vogue in Wales in the eighteenth century (as it is today).

As many scholars have noted, William Williams completely ignored the Welsh bardic tradition. As we’ve stressed repeatedly in various episodes of Yr Hen Iaith, one of the remarkable things about Welsh literature is the longevity of that tradition. Bardic praise composed in the sixteenth century was in many ways very much like canu mawl (praise poetry) composed four centuries earlier.

The strict cywydd metre made popular by Dafydd ap Gwilym during the first half of the fourteenth century has remained in use ever since. In the forty-ninth episode of this series, we saw that new free metres devised in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries so that Welsh words could be sung to English tunes, and that these were then sometimes adorned with cynghanedd.

This can be seen as taking Welsh metrical possession of a verse form ‘foreign’ in origin. Such is the Welsh love of cynghanedd, and such is the strength of the Welsh bardic tradition. Pantycelyn turned his back completely on all of that.

Mercurial

We’ll end with a quote from the book about Pantycelyn which Saunders Lewis published in 1927. This is an extremely mercurial work, even in the context of that extremely mercurial scholar’s career, both incisive and misleading, ground-breaking and confounding. For Lewis, the praise poetry of Catholic Wales during the period ending with the Protestant Reformation was the ‘Classical Period’, and he saw Pantycelyn’s work as yet another rupture separating Welsh literature from its own tradition.

‘Williams yw’r bardd pwysig cyntaf ar ôl y Cyfnod Clasurol, ac yr oedd ei ffilosoffi ef, ei dyb am natur ac amcanion barddoniaeth, yn groes i holl ddamcaniaethau’r Estheteg Gymreig.’

‘Williams is the first important poet after the Classical Period, and his philosophy, his assumptions about the nature and purposes of poetry, is completely at odds with the theories of the Welsh Aesthetic.’

It is this break with aesthetic tradition which has led some to view Williams as the first modern poet in Wales.

Further Reading:

Branwen Jarvis, ‘Goronwy Owen: Neoclassical Poet and Critic’, in Branwen Jarvis (ed.) A guide to Welsh literature c.1700-1800 (2000).

Kathryn Jenkins, ‘Williams Pantycelyn’, in Branwen Jarvis (ed.) A guide to Welsh literature c.1700-1800 (2000).

Saunders Lewis, Williams Pantycelyn (1927 [reprint 1991]).

Glyn Tegai Hughes, Williams Pantycelyn [Writers of Wales], (1983).

Derec Llwyd Morgan, Meddwl a Dychymyg Williams Pantycelyn (1991).

Episode fourty nine in this series: https://nation.cymru/culture/yr-hen-iaith-part-forty-nine-love-protest-and-the-ideology-of-metre-poetry/

[1] Branwen Jarvis, ‘Goronwy Owen: Neoclassical Poet and Critic’, in Branwen Jarvis (ed.) A guide to Welsh literature c.1700-1800 (2000).