The complex vision

by John Cowper Powys

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Genres: Philosophy

404 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1920

About the author

Powys was born in Shirley, Derbyshire, where his father was vicar. His mother was descended from the poet William Cowper, hence his middle name. His two younger brothers, Llewelyn Powys and Theodore Francis Powys, also became well-known writers. Other brothers and sisters also became prominent in the arts.

John studied at Sherborne School and Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and became a teacher and lecturer; as lecturer, he worked first in England, then in continental Europe and finally in the USA, where he lived in the years 1904-1934. While in the United States, his work was championed by author Theodore Dreiser. He engaged in public debate with Bertrand Russell and the philosopher and historian Will Durant: he was called for the defence in the first obscenity trial for the James Joyce novel, Ulysses, and was mentioned with approval in the autobiography of US feminist and anarchist, Emma Goldman.

He made his name as a poet and essayist, moving on to produce a series of acclaimed novels distinguished by their uniquely detailed and intensely sensual recreation of time, place and character. They also describe heightened states of awareness resulting from mystic revelation, or from the experience of extreme pleasure or pain. The best known of these distinctive novels are A Glastonbury Romance and Wolf Solent. He also wrote some works of philosophy and literary criticism, including a pioneering tribute to Dorothy Richardson.

Having returned to the UK, he lived in England for a brief time, then moved to Corwen in Wales, where he wrote historical romances (including two set in Wales) and magical fantasies. He later moved to Blaenau Ffestiniog, where he remained until his death in 1963.

Reviews

[Andrew Noselli · Rating 3 out of 5]

He obviously influenced Henry Miller, for one.

[Richard S · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book of - philosophy? Psychology? Is so incredibly - unreadable - it hardly seems to be at all like it's written by the same JC Powys of his other books. To call it extremely long and "tedious" would be an understatement - he has an incomprehensible theory about what he calls the "complex vision" - a combination of 11 different things - and - perhaps I'm just not smart enough to understand - but it goes on for pages and pages - and while I kept hoping for nuggets of Powys' insight and - help me - humor - I felt helpless, paragraph after paragraph that just escaped me. Perhaps, and this is a big perhaps, it will help me understand some of his later works - I suspect that the various "epiphanies" many of his characters have are perhaps moments of this "complex vision", but rather I think this is Powys going off on a bizarre tangent. You might say it's genius or insanity, but rather I suspect he's just a very bad and confused philosopher. Writers are sometimes good and bad at various things - JC Powys is a genius at fiction, literary criticism, and personal self-help/realization, fairly decent at poetry, but really terrible at philosophy and contemporary commentary. I suppose the philosophy may turn out helpful in understanding his later work (if so I will come back and edit this review) but my memory of his later novels do not seem to relate to this work at all.