Idris Davies - Life

Life

After leaving the local school at the age of fourteen, for the next seven years Davies worked underground as a miner in the nearby McLaren Pit at Abertysswg and later at the Maerdy Pit, Pontlottyn. After an accident in which he lost a finger at the coalface, and active participation in the General Strike of 1926, the pit closed and he became unemployed. He spent the next four years following what he called "the long and lonely self-tuition game", having been introduced to the work of Shelley by a fellow miner.

He qualified as a teacher through courses at Loughborough College and the University of Nottingham. During the Second World War he took teaching posts at various schools in London, where he became friends with Dylan Thomas. Before the publishing of his first book in 1938, Davies' work appeared in the Western Mail, the Merthyr Express, the Daily Herald, the Left Review and Comment.

In 1947 he returned to teach at a school in the Rhymney Valley in Wales.. The poems for his second anthology, published by Faber and Faber in 1945, were chosen by T. S. Eliot. Eliot thought that Davies' poems had a claim to permanence, describing them as "the best poetic document I know about a particular epoch in a particular place".

His final volume, Selected Poems, was published shortly before his death. Around this time Dylan Thomas wrote Davies a surprisingly touching letter. Thomas had read Bells of Rhymney as part of a St. David's Day radio broadcast, but told Davies that he did not feel the poem was particularly representative of Davies' work, as it was "not angry enough".

Idris Davies died from abdominal cancer, aged 48, at his mother's house at 7, Victoria Road, Rhymney on Easter Monday, 6 April 1953. He was buried in Rhymney Public Cemetery. There are memorial plaques to Davies at Victoria Road and at the town library.

After his death over two hundred of his manuscript poems and a short verse-play, together with the typescripts of his comprehensive wartime diaries, were deposited at the National Library of Wales at Aberystwyth. Later, more of his unpublished poems and most of his prose — an unfinished novel, essays, lecture notes and some of his letters — were found. Some of this later material appeared posthumously in The Collected Poems of Idris Davies (1972); Idris Davies (1972), and Argo Record No. ZPL.1181: Idris Davies (1972).

There is a modern memorial sculpture for Davies in Rhymney, with an inscription reading When April came to Rhymney with shower and sun and shower - the opening line of his poem "Rhymney" .