Saunders Lewis (born John Saunders Lewis; 15 October 1893 – 1 September 1985) was a Welsh politician, poet, dramatist, Medievalist, and literary critic. Born into a Welsh-speaking ministerial family in Greater Liverpool, Lewis rediscovered the importance of both his heritage language and cultural roots while serving as a junior officer in the British Army during the trenches of the First World War. As a vocal supporter of Welsh nationalism, Lewis believed, however, that heritage language revival, cultural nationalism, the dramatic arts, and culture needed to precede Welsh devolution or political independence. If the excessive Anglophilia and colonial mentality traditionally known as Dic Siôn Dafydd was never challenged or defeated, Lewis predicted in 1918, "the Welsh Parliament would [only] be an enlarged County Council."Jelle Krol (2020), Minority Language Writers in the Wake of World War One: A Case Study of Four European Authors, Palgrave. Page 107.
Lewis accordingly became a co-founder of Plaid Genedlaethol Cymru (The National Party of Wales), now the Welsh nationalist political party known as Plaid Cymru, at a covert meeting with fellow nationalists during the 1925 National Eisteddfod of Wales. Lewis has been described by Jan Morris as, "the most passionate of twentieth century Welsh patriots",Jan Morris (1984), The Matter of Wales: Epic Views of a Small Country, Oxford University Press. Page 352. and as being, "one of the few twentieth century writers in Welsh with a European reputation, but for many Welshmen [he was] chiefly the keeper of the national conscience."Jan Morris (1984), The Matter of Wales: Epic Views of a Small Country, Oxford University Press. Page 132. Lewis is usually acknowledged as one of the most vitally important figures in 20th-century Welsh-language literature. He is also widely credited, through his 1962 radio address Tynged yr Iaith ("The Fate of the Language"), with almost singlehandedly bringing Welsh back from the brink of language death.
In 1970, Lewis was nominated for a Nobel Prize in Literature and was appointed as a Knight Commander of the Order of St Gregory by Pope Paul VI. Saunders Lewis' traditionalist Catholic and distributist beliefs gave him a simultaneously anti-Marxist and anti-colonialist interpretation of Welsh history and a similar vision, influenced by his study of what had he considered to have worked in Irish nationalism, for the future of the Welsh people. Lewis was voted the tenth greatest Welsh hero in the '100 Welsh Heroes' poll, released on St. David's Day 2004.Bevan is ultimate Welsh hero extracted 12-04-07
Early life John Saunders Lewis was born into a Welsh-speaking family in Wallasey in the Wirral, Cheshire, in the north-west of England, on 15 October 1893. He was the second of three sons of Lodwig Lewis (1859–1933), a Calvinistic Methodist minister, and his wife Mary Margaret (née Thomas, 1862–1900). When he was only six years old, Lewis's mother died and his unmarried maternal "Aunt Ellen" (Ellen Elizabeth Thomas) moved into the manse and helped to raise him.Jelle Krol (2020), Minority Language Writers in the Wake of World War One: A Case Study of Four European Authors, Palgrave. Pages 76-87.
Jan Morris has described Liverpool as the closest there is to a metropolis for the people of North Wales. During a television interview with Aneirin Talfan Davies, Lewis later recalled that this was also true during his childhood, as in and around Liverpool, "there were around about a hundred thousand Welsh-speaking Welsh people... So I was not born in English-speaking England... but into a society that was completely Welsh and Welsh-speaking."Jelle Krol (2020), Minority Language Writers in the Wake of World War One: A Case Study of Four European Authors, Palgrave. Page 87.
Even though his father was a scholar, "who liked solitude and study", and possessed a very large library of Welsh literature, the only Welsh-language books that Saunders Lewis read while growing up were Bishop Morgan's Bible, the hymnbook, and Sunday school commentaries.Jelle Krol (2020), Minority Language Writers in the Wake of World War One: A Case Study of Four European Authors, Palgrave. Page 88.
Lewis attended prestigious English-speaking Liscard High School for Boys where he was bullied at first, due to the fact that what little English he could speak, "was full of Welsh words." In time, however, Lewis became, "a typical product of the English education system." He became editor of The Liscard High School Magazine and often visited the Wallasey Public Library, where he read contemporary English literature and, as a teenager, was enthusiastic when he discovered the recent mythopoeic poetry and prose reimaginings of Irish folklore and mythology by Irish nationalists William Butler Yeats, John Millington Synge, and Padraic Colum.Jelle Krol (2020), Minority Language Writers in the Wake of World War One: A Case Study of Four European Authors, Palgrave. Page 87-88.
Lewis later recalled that through these writers, "I came for the first time to understand what patriotism meant and the spirit of the nation meant. And I soon began to think that things like those, which had seized hold of them in Ireland, were the things I should seize hold of in Wales."
Lewis' earliest attempts at writing poems were in English and were inspired by William Wordsworth, Walter Pater, John Wesley and the King James Bible.
Personal life After entering Liverpool University to study English literature in 1911, Lewis is believed to have first met fellow student Margaret Gilcriest, a Roman Catholic from County Wicklow and staunch believer in Irish political and cultural nationalism, in December 1913. Lewis and Gilcriest shared an enthusiasm for literature and in their subsequent courtship by letters, all of which have since been published, there are references to the writings of Dora Sigerson, Katherine Tynan, James Clarence Mangan, Alice Meynell, Emily Lawless, Tom Kettle, Daniel Corkery, and James Joyce.Jelle Krol (2020), Minority Language Writers in the Wake of World War One: A Case Study of Four European Authors, Palgrave. Page 89.
After his aunt Ellen persuaded his father "to accept the inevitable", Lewis and Margaret Gilcriest (1891-1984) were married at Our Lady and St Michael Roman Catholic Church in Workington, Cumberland, on 31 July 1924. They had one child, a daughter.LEWIS, JOHN SAUNDERS (1893-1985), Dictionary of Welsh Biography.Mair Saunders Jones, daughter of Plaid pioneer, dies, BBC News, 9 February 2011.
First World War
When the First World War broke out, an idealistic Lewis, feeling inspired by the Aesthete philosophy of Walter Pater to, "savour this experience of life-energy at the utmost", enlisted in the 3rd Battalion, King's Liverpool Regiment on 4 September 1914. British Army records describe Lewis at the time as five-feet and three inches in height, weighing just over seven and a half stone, and as having red hair and grey eyes.
In April 1915, Lewis applied for a commission with the South Wales Borderers and was promoted to full lieutenant in February 1916. The following summer, he was deployed to active service on the Western Front.
During the war, Lewis read the trilogy of novels The Cult of the Self (French: Le Culte du moi) by the French writer Maurice Barrès. Barrès, a French nationalist, had called since the 1890s, alongside Paul Claudel and Paul Bourget, for, "a 'return' to national values and traditions."Jelle Krol (2020), Minority Language Writers in the Wake of World War One: A Case Study of Four European Authors, Palgrave. Page 106. This volume heavily influenced Lewis' growing sense of his own Welsh identity and belief in the vital importance of cultural nationalism.
Furthermore, according to Jelle Krol, Lewis, was amazed to see how his own father's recent words of advice were echoed by Barrès, who wrote, "the only way to cultivate your personality as an artist and to develop your own resources, is to go back to your roots".Jelle Krol (2020), Minority Language Writers in the Wake of World War One: A Case Study of Four European Authors, Palgrave. Page 105. Lewis accordingly, "discovered the importance of his Welsh roots during his service in France."Jelle Krol (2020), Minority Language Writers in the Wake of World War One: A Case Study of Four European Authors, Palgrave. Page 75.
In April 1917, Lewis was severely wounded in action in the left leg and thigh near Gonnelieu, with, "the calf of the leg nearly blown away", as part of the Battle of Cambrai. Afterwards, Lewis needed more than a year to convalesce, during which his younger brother, Ludwig Lewis, was killed in action on 7 July 1917. Although Lewis desperately wanted to visit and help comfort their grieving father at Swansea, his own battlefield injuries were still far too severe to permit him to travel.
In a 23 July 1918 letter to The Cambria Daily Leader, Lewis, as he would do for the remainder of his life, explained why he felt cultural nationalism needed to precede political decolonisation, "In Wales, if we gave ourselves less to party politics and more to the development of our own education and culture, we should make Wales more fitted to have an independent life of her own under Home Rule. And Home Rule, before we have a real national spirit, would mean simply that the Welsh Parliament would be an enlarged County Council."
Return to Wales After his return from the trenches, Lewis entered the literary field by arguing that three conditions needed to be met for Welsh literature to become truly meaningful. Firstly, "a more professional attitude to Welsh drama". Secondly, the reestablishment of a direct link between Welsh culture with that of mainland Europe, and particularly with French culture, and, lastly, a more continual religious and cultural exploration of pre-Reformation Wales by Welsh writers and intellectuals.
In a 22 October 1919 letter to The Cambria Daily Leader, called for a revival of drama in the Welsh language, beginning with the improvement of dramas set in the villages, "All the plays we have seen so far describe, and rather idyllically describe, village manners. But village life is more than 'manners'. It includes memories and traditions and song and even dance and mummery. Village and peasant drama, if it should tell the round truth, must include romance, the Mabinogion, the monastery, witchcraft, fairyland, and all the ancient playgrounds of men. Let us widen our field."Jelle Krol (2020), Minority Language Writers in the Wake of World War One: A Case Study of Four European Authors, Palgrave. Page 98.
In a letter of 25 October 1919 to the same newspaper, Lewis urged Welsh-language playwrights and the theatre going public to both, "take note of the dramatic history of Europe." Lewis continued, "And so it seems to me we should begin anew with translation. We should translate into Welsh the plays of the acknowledged masters, of Euripides, of Corneille, of Racine, of Moliere, of Ibsen, of the Spaniards, and we should act them continually; we should learn the classics."
In 1922, he was appointed as lecturer in Welsh literature at the University College of Wales, Swansea. During his time at Swansea he produced some of his most significant works of literary criticism: A School of Welsh Augustans (1924), Williams Pantycelyn (1927), and (An outline history of Welsh literature) (1932). He continued in this post until his dismissal for a political act of arson at Penyberth, Gwynedd, in 1936.
Founding Plaid Cymru