ABSTRACT
Edward Williams, more often known by his preferred bardic name, Iolo Morganwg, made a substantial contribution to the revival of interest in Welsh history, poetry and folklore in the Romantic period, but his own verse, less often remembered, is of considerable significance in the labouring-class tradition. Many of the poems are conventional pastorals in the style of Shenstone, but there are moments of greater ambition, principally in the translations—some genuine, others forged—and the attempt to fuse the genres of lyric and pastoral, in order to construct a new sense of the relationship between the aesthetics of solitude and the ethics of community. After 1794, Williams quit his work as a stonemason, to attempt farming, shopkeeping and bookselling, though without conspicuous success: he made a series of mostly successful, but increasingly abject, appeals for assistance from the Literary Fund, as ill health, drug addiction and 'folly' gradually destabilised his family.
