As someone with a deep rooted interest in Welsh poetry, it has been my mission to expand my interests and listen to the voices of the more underrated poets to emerge from this country who often get lost in poetry anthologies beneath the likes of the well loved, tried and true Dylan Thomas and R. S. Thomas types. Born near Aberdare in 1915, Alun Lewis is remembered for his relatable portrayal of the inner thoughts of a Welshman in a war riddled Great Britain, and his telling’s of his turbulent personal life had me hooked from my first reading of Collected Poems. As a Welsh writer and avid poetry reader myself, Lewis’ works are rich in cultural heritage, so I felt inspired to do some further reading.

Lewis has primarily been described as a war poet, in fact often considered one of the finest of his kind, so when I picked up Collected Poems I was expecting a more straightforward recount of the brutalities of the second world war in which Lewis found himself entangled. Indeed, many of Lewis’ works do deal with the circumstances of his time in the traditional sense -- he enlisted in the army in May 1940 and was stationed in Burma on the brink of fighting by 1944 so Lewis certainly wrote an assortment of Poems in Khaki. There seems to be a certain admiration for his more notable works like Raider’s Dawn, a poem detailing the lives of men waiting for the time they would be called to war, and later The Last Inspection, which shared a number of short stories derived from army life. A piece which stood out to me in particular is The Defeated: for Wales, in which Lewis expresses a degree of disdain when he refers to the “honour”, “valour” and “fame” that propaganda promised to young men who, like himself, served as soldiers in the war. He contrasts this with the graphic reality: “bled white are our wounds”. As a notable pacifist, his poetry doesn’t shy away from sharing the blatant and honest opinions of a man who was aware of the realities of war which were far from heroic.

But as one reads deeper into the words of Lewis, it is clear to see why he has been described as “tortured” by his biographer John Pikoulis.  Lewis was upfront about the fact that he was fighting his own war with his shaky mental health and the realities of life --  a war that may be considered less traditional in terms of definitions, yet nonetheless one which most of us will also stand on the frontline of in our lifetimes. It seems that Lewis uses the setting of war to take us behind, beneath and through a battle fought between man and himself. In The Sentry he wrote “I have begun to die / For now at last I know / That there is no escape / From night,” a reference to the dark, all consuming depression which plagued his living days, and some say a foreshadowing of his suspected suicide.

Lewis wasn’t afraid to talk about the darkest parts of the human experience. Goodbye uses the perspective of a soldier, presumably himself, going away to war to explore the anguish of leaving a  loved one and Lady in Black deals with the losses of the said loved ones who are left behind. Lewis even wrote about the guilt that overwhelmed him regarding the affair he had with a married woman in Burma in Ways.

Lewis’ use of the circumstances of his time to explore issues we all face as humans is what makes his poetry appealing to a new generation, still trying to understand their own nature. Of course, Lewis died under mysterious circumstances while on active service in Burma, so it is impossible to ask whether he ever found what the answer in life he was looking for. However, Collected Poems inspired me to make my own trip as a part of my own journey of discovery to Aberdare where Lewis was born and raised -- and where he fell in love, where he suffered from the “gestapo” of his own brain, and where he was eventually laid to rest – to see the cwm where Lewis recognised that life is a war filled with it’s own daily bittersweet brutalities. Our circumstances are different; I am not living in a country riddled with war. I am not a pacifist stationed in Burma forced to fight. But as I sit upon a “namless hill” overlooking Aberdare – where I imagine he may have stationed himself, armed with a pen and not a gun – I am certain he is more than just a war poet. I feel a connection to Alun Lewis. For we are all the same in human nature.

Collected Poems is available via Amazon.