SOME APPRECIATIONS
'John Cowper Powys was a master of the English language, perhaps the greatest of our time. In the presence of Wolf Solent, A Glastonbury Romance, Jobber Skald, Porius, the labour of all but Hardy, D.H. Lawrence and Joyce diminishes. For blaze of truth, our literature can set Powys's Autobiography against Nietzsche and Montaigne. Beside Owen Glendower, with its Shakespearean largesse of recaptured life, nearly all historical novels are charade. Ours has been a time of the inhuman, of the less than man. But Powys did it honour.' George Steiner.
'John Cowper Powys...was the most original English writer of our century...Powys's novels have been compared to Tolstoy, but his masters in the craft are Dostoevsky, Scott and Hardy (a strange trio). To them he has added his wonderful self-knowledge and honesty as shown in his Autobiography... his vast, versatile, uneven, undisciplined mass of novels, essays, poetry and criticism [remain] the unique, unmined literary treasure house of our time.' Angus Wilson
'...the most underrated writer of the twentieth century — and one of the world's truly great novelists.' Professor Charles Lock
'Powys's Autobiography I still believe to be the greatest, the most magnificent of all autobiographies.' Henry Miller
'As an original in life and letters [JCP] can take a place beside Sterne or anybody else. I declare, without hesitation, that John Cowper Powys is one of the few, the very few, English novelists of the last fifty years of whom it can be said that they have not talent but genius.' J.B. Priestley
'We have today no more consummate stylist than Mr Powys. I know of no living writer with so vast a vocabulary at his command, nor anything like his mastery of the long sentence. The style is classically grand with cadences reminiscent of Sir Thomas Browne and yet, somehow, also homely and colloquial, while every phrase bears the imprint of a unique personality.' Professor G. Wilson Knight
'There is little doubt that [JCP] will stand with James, Lawrence, and Joyce in the eyes of future critics.' Angus Wilson
'Powys is never obscure, and his large works, with their long and classically modulated periods, their wealth of vocabulary and allusion, their strange assurance and utter independence of what most of us would say that he ought to be writing, pursue us with the unhurrying and unperturbed pace of Francis Thompson's God in "The Hound of Heaven". Escape has proved impossible, and we are today watching the steady rise to full recognition of one of the outstanding writers of our century.' G. Wilson Knight
'At present France's tally of Powys translations remains unsurpassed, and it is encouraging that prestige publishing houses such as Gallimard (whose list includes Proust, Yourcenar and Giono) and Flammarion have often led the way, though credit is also due to lesser firms like Minerve.' Dr Cedric Hentschel
'...the English novelist I admire most.' Angus Wilson
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