Decadent Landscapes, AM [Hill of Dreams]

Date of Publication shows the difficulty that AM had in publishing HoD [published ten years after completion]. He doesn't fit into the circle around Decadence; writes into the period known as modernism but is by no means a decadent.

- Landscape - Representation, not about reality. A mode of representation, decadent - foregrounding form. - Visual. - Nexus of ideological, cultural values [Williams, R]. - Ruskin's critique of modernity: - Lack of beauty/ashamed of the art of the battle/interest in things rather than men [commodification, individualism] Outside world becomes humanistic. - Challenged by Pater, who disagreed with the objective way to capture landscape. Mystical approach to the landscape, [Preface: Renaissance - a turning inwards, shutting of the eyes]. - Subjective power/creation - which can also be destructive. A focus on form, opposed to the interiority of the landscape. Solipsism. - Landscape that foregrounds form, literary - allusion, over stylisation. Politics of landscape writing, references: rejecting a 19th century romantic vision of Wales...
- Victorian Wales - Celtic revival. - Ernest Rhys; give to a Wales a new deliverance, as Yeats had delivered to Ireland. - Primitivism, drives poetry - landscape/nature is yet to be corrupted. - AM, thinking about his Wales in brood with the Roman. Not interested in a spiritual rejuvenation of Welsh literature...
- AM's Hieroglyphics of Nature - Language and Symbolism from the Book of Revelations. Turning light into revolutionary opposed to illuminating. - Antipathy towards the 'trendy' part of Decadence; foreign to Wilde et al. - Revels in the irrational, and in the spiritual. He doesn't turn it into a despairing notion. - Anti-materialist position, mistake the surface of the world