Wolf Solent (Penguin Modern Classics)

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John Cowper Powys is a writer who changes how you see the world.’ — Michael Henderson, The Telegraph Weymouth Sands (1934)

Anthony Head, "Introduction" to The Diary of John Cowper Powys for 1929, ed. Anthony Head. London: Cecil Woolf, 1998, p7.Powys evoked the English landscape with an almost sexual intensity. Hardy comes to mind, but a Hardy drunk and feverish with mystical exuberance.’ — Philip Pullman

Ichiro Hara, "John Cowper Powys and Zen". The Powys Review, vol. II, iii (no. 7) Winter 1980, pp. 24–34; Cicely Hill "'Susukeshi Hina Mo': John Cowper Powys and the Chuang-Tse Legacy", The Powys Review (no. 7), pp. 34–44. Sherborne station 2009. The novel opens with Wolf Solent travelling to Ramsgard station, based on Sherborne station, from London in 1921. Plot summary [ edit ] His first novel Wood and Stone, which Powys dedicated to Thomas Hardy, was published in 1915. This was followed by two collections of literary essays Visions and Revisions (1915) and Suspended Judgment (1916). In Confessions of Two Brothers (1916), a work that also contains a section by his brother Llewelyn, Powys writes about his personal philosophy, something he elaborated on in The Complex Vision (1920), his first full length work of popular philosophy. He also published three collections of poetry between 1916 and 1922. It was not until 1929, with the novel Wolf Solent, that Powys achieved any critical or financial success. [23] In 1930 Powys and Phyllis moved from Greenwich Village in New York City to Hillsdale in rural upstate New York. [24] One of Powys's most admired novels, A Glastonbury Romance, published in 1932, sold well, though he made little if any money from it because of a libel lawsuit. [25] Another important work, Autobiography, was published in 1934.Denis Lane, "The Elemental Image in Wolf Solent", in In the Spirit of Powys: New Essays, ed. Denis Lane. London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1990, p. 57. In May 1955 they moved, for the last time, to Blaenau Ffestiniog in North Wales. John Cowper Powys died in 1963 and Phyllis Playter in 1982. [30] Blaenau Ffestiniog, where Powys lived from 1955 until he died in 1963 Works [ edit ] Poetry [ edit ] This new, and first complete, edition of the novel substantiates both Steiner's judgement and Powys's claim for Porius as his masterpiece.

C. A. Coates, John Cowper Powys in Search of a Landscape. Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble, 1982, p. 90. The Dorset Year: The Diary of John Cowper Powys, 1934-1935, ed. Morine Krissdóttir and Roger Peers (1998)JCP’s explorations into consciousness were not, of course, confined to human relations. Perhaps his most significant authorial achievement was the astonishing reach of his empathic sensitivity in presenting the natural world — animal, vegetable, mineral, climatic and cosmic — as a sentient concourse of living intelligence with which human life is always, whether consciously or unconsciously, vitally interactive, and on which our sanity and survival depend.’ — Lindsay Clarke The only novel produced by an English writer that can fairly be compared with the fictions of Tolstoy and Dostoyevski.’ — George Steiner, The New Yorker