SOURCE: “Alun Lewis: The Early Stories,” in The Anglo-Welsh Review, Vol. 20, No. 46, Spring, 1972, pp. 77-82.

In the following essay, Banerjee examines Lewis's early stories, finding in them evidence of the success of the later, better-known stories and poems.

The relative merits of Alun Lewis's poetry and short stories have long been in dispute. Was he basically a prose-writer, who only turned to poetry under the stress of service conditions, or was he, as one reviewer suggested, “a natural poet fascinated by the problems of the short story, which he once or twice brilliantly solved?”¹ One clue is to be found in a letter to Freda Aykroyd in India, where Lewis tries to define the impulses which lie behind the poetry and the prose, and himself suggests that the two represent different but complementary aspects of his art: “I think the poems are an act of daring, always daring...