SOURCE: "The Problem of Powys," in Times Literary Supplement, No. 3819, May 16, 1975, p. 541.

In the following excerpt, Steiner discusses the reception of Powys's works in England and elsewhere.

There is, of course, a Powys problem. For G. Wilson Knight, perhaps the noblest of our critics, John Cowper Powys is a writer whose powers, whose visionary penetration and mastery of the concrete are, not in any loose metaphoric sense but by virtue of closely argued analogy and estimate, Shakespearean. Angus Wilson finds in Powys a novelist whose genius for comedy and crowd, for larger-than-life characters shaping and being shaped by the animate agencies of the environment is the rival of Dickens's. To a faithful circle of British readers, Powys is not only a supreme artist, but the great seer after Blake and a companion for life. No less than during his career as a charismatic lecturer—with members of the...