‘where we put our suffering’: Tony Conran's Elegiac Modernism

Abstract

Translator, essayist, and poet Tony Conran (1931–2013) is an underappreciated figure of twentieth-century poetry, whose productive late-career phase began in 1993, when his book-length, modernist poem Castles earned him the runner-up slot in both the BBC Wales Writer of the Year Award and the Wales Book of the Year Awards. In this discussion, Conran's Castles is considered as an example of elegiac modernism. Formally experimental and linguistically dense, the poem uses multiple mythic and historic frames of reference to situate both personal and public elegies. Analysis of this poem sheds light on Conran's engagement with both high modernism and the centuries-old Welsh poetic tradition. Moreover, the variety and quality of his output from 1993 marks him as a significant voice of contemporary poetry. Situated within critical debates surrounding modernism's newly expanded geographical and temporal scope, this article draws on Conran's unpublished correspondence and commentary in order to enrich our understanding of Castles and its specific Welsh modernist context.