[“Wales a desert” or “deserted Wales”] was the first book of the Anglophone Welsh poet and prose writer Idris Davies (1905-1953). A single poem comprised of thirty-six sections, its expansive and variegated whole contains a myriad of different styles, poetic forms, and thematic preoccupations.

can be read on several levels, and understood in as many different ways: it is, at one and the same time, a powerful indictment of industrial capitalism and industrialisation; a Welsh exile’s fraught attempt at inscribing native territory, self and past; and a portrait of industrialised south Wales during the economic downturn of the 1920s and 1930s. The poem is, in short, a highly complex, multi-layered text – and one that has status in Welsh and…

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Citation: Jones, Alan Vaughan. "Gwalia Deserta". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 28 December 2011 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=32343, accessed 20 April 2024.]

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