Nicholas Jones16 Sep 2004

Cultural annihilation and commodification is worse than simply displaying the scars. The past shouldn't be sanitised and made safe. Reading this again, though, I think mainly that I'd been reading too much R. S. Thomas. I think that R. S., for all his faults (his oversimplistic hatred of English language culture, the hideously patronising Iago Prytherch poems), was perhaps the greatest poet to come out of Wales in the twentieth century (in English, at any rate, in Welsh I'd have to suggest Gwenallt). But his influence hasn't really been healthy, because it has fostered this sense of isolation and a nationalism based on historical doom. (See Dafydd Elis Thomas in Poetry Wales sometime in the 1970s).

As it happens, I'm English, and English is my first language. But my father is Welsh, and I've just spent three years in Swansea studying for a PhD in the field of Welsh Writing in English (on the poet Harri Webb). I've been learning Welsh for that time only.