Ben Bowen (Writers of Wales)

Chapman, T. R. Ben Bowen (Writers of Wales)(University of Wales Press, 2003) RAE2008

Published in the centenary year of Ben Bowen's death, this is the first extended, dispassionate account of the life and work of the Treorci-born poet. When Bowen died aged twenty-four in 1903, the Welsh literary establishment predicted his immortality. Yet, just a generation later, he had become little more than a footnote in the history of nineteenth-century poetry. In this study, Robin Chapman reveals Bowen?s short-lived fame and subsequent obscurity as a product both of Bowen's precocious sense of himself as a great poet and of a Wales that fed that assumption. He traces Bowen's escape from a miner's life in the Rhondda, his stay in South Africa during the Boer War, his talent for controversy and his growing awareness of his impending death. Through a consideration of the life and work of this compelling character, Robin Chapman also enhances our understanding of Welsh culture in late-Victorian and early-Edwardian Wales.