John cowper powys biography definition

Entry updated 1 December 2024. Tagged: Author.

(1872-1963) UK author, resident for much of his career in the USA, though he returned to Wales in the 1930s, active from around 1896 until a year or so before his death; the first half century of his career as a novelist was mostly devoted to tales in which civilization, out of touch with the mythopoeic nature of reality, conspicuously lacks an understanding of the primacy of Sex in true Religion.

They are of some interest where they enter realms of Fantastika – A Glastonbury Romance (1932 2vols), for instance, conflates the lives of Joseph of Arimathea and of its contemporary protagonist, evoking en passant the Holy Grail – but are not sf.

The novels of his old age – beginning with Morwyn, or The Vengeance of God (1937), where Hell is seen as a kind of posthumous Dystopia where vivisection is permitted – combine fantasy and sf elements in an attempt, sometimes obscure, to heat his eccentric mysticis