Excerpt from The Literary Relationships of Dafydd Ap Gwilym

Moreover, it is less in his love-songs than in his nature-poems that Dafydd's prime poetic gift most distinctively appears. Indeed, his lyrics of Nature - among which his poems on birds stand out as signal examples - are so unlike anything else in the whole range of mediæval literature as to constitute, in their kind, the most original contribution of the native genius of Wales to the world's poetry.

But, however original a poet's natural gift and manner of utterance may seem to be, he is, after all, the child of his age, and must of necessity owe much to the literary culture which was his birth-right. Dafydd's own countrymen, in particular, have been too much in the habit of regarding him as an untutored genius, and of scouting the suggestion that his poetry may have owed anything to external influences. The truth, however, is that Dafydd ap Gwilym was, for his time, a considerable scholar, and that, in his poetry, he drew largely both upon such books as were accessible to him and upon all the poetical lore and precept that came his way. My object in this paper is to trace some of the more obvious of his relationships with his predecessors in the art of poetry, and, more particularly, with the Provencal Troubadours. Several critics have already written a good deal about Dafydd's relation to the Welsh bards who preceded him, and of his indebtedness to those classical writers, chiefly Latin, who were popular in the Middle Ages.

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