‘Great Creative Nature’
This year’s conference is dedicated to the memory of our late President
Timothy Hyman, RA
For this year’s conference we are delighted to return to Llangollen and the hospitable Hand Hotel. The opportunity this offers to reacquaint ourselves with familiar places nearby all associated with JCP is an alluring prospect.
We all know how JCP loved to repeat quotations and phrases extracted from his favourite reading especially Shakespeare. Our conference title this year is no exception: ‘Great Creative Nature’ is a misquotation from Perdita’s speech in A Winter’s Tale in which Perdita refers to ‘great creating nature’ (Act IV, Scene, IV). JCP adapts the phrase in Autobiography, A Glastonbury Romance, Weymouth Sands, The Inmates, and Owen Glendower. In the context of our conference the quote suggests the creative power, energy and richness of the natural world, the creativity of imagination, the great forces of creation and destruction that flow out of the First Cause, emotional exultation, love, desire and death, the ebb and flow of emotional intimacy, the mystery of man’s inner psychic nature. “Great creative nature delivered the truth” JCP says in The Inmates and goes on: “Great creative nature has given us the power of forgetting except pain.” JCP wrote sympathetically in his diary for 5 March 1930: “How good Creative Nature can be to her poor derelicts. She can be kinder than the most charitable men.”
We are very pleased to welcome back to our conference JCP’s biographer and past Chair of the Powys Society, Morine Krissdóttir, who will examine some of the very complicated and intricate issues connected with the editing of JCP’s letters to Phyllis Playter. Morine promises to show how the letters reveal new information about the lives of JCP and Phyllis. Kim Wheatley, who is coming to the conference from America, will follow up aspects of her new book about JCP called JCP and the Afterlife of Romanticism, and give a lecture on JCP’s interpretation of Shelley and his poetry. Hilary Bedder will look at the role of women in the writings of Sylvia Townsend Warner and TFP. Hilary will examine the physical and social setting of East Chaldon, and the influence that place, and the ‘pastoral’ exerted on both writers. This year marks the 100th anniversary of JCP’s novel Ducdame. Nicholas Birns, official representative of the Powys Society in the USA, will give a lecture on the place of Ducdame in JCP’swriting process and his evolution as a writer. Ducdame is replete with references to great creative nature such as ‘flowering hedgerows in hot cornfields’, ‘quivering vibrations in the air’, ‘thyme scented banks’ and ‘cuckoo flowers in the damp margins of the fields’. The novel has an epigraph quoted from As You Like It and is dedicated to ‘that superior man’, Kwang-Tze, suggesting JCP’s personal preference for a Taoist world view. Nicholas will discuss the significance of these citations as well as the characters, the ‘etherealised’ atmosphere, and the real places depicted in the novel. The title of Nicholas’s talk directs the reader to the conclusion of the story and JCP’s literary imagery: ‘his love like a spear driven into the bed of a swollen river stood up visible through the driving mist…a signpost in the night, a signal, a token that would outlast his own days.’
Members are invited on enjoy a free Saturday afternoon by travelling to Corwen to revisit places that featured prominently in JCP’s daily life such as Caer Drewyn, Liberty Hall, the river Dee, Llangar church, or the Gorsedd stone circle and Pen y Pigyn.
On Saturday evening Ray Crozier will give an informal PowerPoint presentation showing images of the Powyses’ various residences in New York together with other relevant locations in and around Greenwich Village evoking the creative atmosphere of their distinctive locale.
Members may wish to bring to the conference their books for sale in the book room.
Chris Thomas, Hon Secretary
