John Cowper Powys and the Afterlife of Romanticism

This study bridges the chronological divide between the Romantic era and the first six decades of the 20th century, interpreting John Cowper Powys (1872 - 1963) as a major, under-recognized contributor to the cultural transmission of Romanticism. Kim Wheatley's John Cowper Powys and the Afterlife of Romanticism uncovers the extent to which this often-misunderstood Modernist-era writer reworked key themes of the Romantic poets. Wheatley shows how Powys's prose rewritings of Romantic poetry expand the story of the afterlife of Romanticism, especially its environmental legacy, thus contributing to ongoing investigations of the posthumous reception of the Romantics, especially William Wordsworth and John Keats. Chapters range across Powys's extensive oeuvre, analyzing his treatment of the Romantics in his works of fiction, autobiographical writings, popular philosophical books, and essays of literary appreciation, including his Autobiography (1934), his four major Wessex novels - Wolf Solent (1929), A Glastonbury Romance (1932), Weymouth Sands (1934), and Maiden Castle (1936) - and his later Welsh historical novels, Owen Glendower (1941) and Porius (1951). Wheatley describes how Powys uniquely combines sense-based nature-worship, the leveling of animate and inanimate, and care for disabled human beings, along with mystical and magical themes, into an all-encompassing ecological vision more capacious than any imagined by the Romantics themselves. She argues that Powys anticipates and presciently interrogates recent revisionary critical approaches to the Romantics, particularly eco-critical approaches, and thus demands a fresh kind of environmentalist criticism open to the transcendental and the supernatural.