If one had to choose only one writer while discussing all of the Welsh-language literature from the nineteenth century, Jerry Hunter says he’d choose Gwilym Hiraethog (1802-1883).
William Rees was born into a family of comparatively poor farmers in the partish of Llansannan, Denbighshire. He had very little formal education, yet this amazing man would contribute in very many different ways to the literary and intellectual life of Wales. He became minister of the Swan Lane Chapel in Denbigh, following Robert Everett, and, like that minister who emigrated to the USA, opposing slavery was one of the radical causes embraced by Gwilym Hiraethog. He then moved to Liverpool and became a mainstay of the Welsh community in that city. He was a multi-facted poet: he composed a number of hymns which are still sung today (to Jerry Hunter’s great disappointment, Richard Wyn Jones refused to sing one!), he wrote some of the most popular strict-metre poetry of his period, and he experimented with that challenging form, the epic. He was also one of the pioneers of the Welsh novel.
As founder and editor of Yr Amserau [‘The Times’], he was amongst the most important people supporting the Welsh-language periodical press in the period as well, and he published many pieces in that paper which presented radical European politics to Welsh readers.