“To Speak in New Ways”: Class and Poetry in Wales since 1970

Abstract

Shortly before Margaret Thatcher’s first re-election as Prime Minister in June 1983, one of Wales’s best-known working-class writers, Raymond Williams, was asked to give a paper entitled ‘Problems of the Coming Period’ to a meeting of the Socialist Society, London. In this chapter, I wish to use Williams’s paper to provide some of the social and historical contexts in which Welsh poetry since 1979 can be understood