Alun Lewis
born July 1, 1915, Aberdare,
Glamorganshire, Wales
died March 5, 1944, Goppe Pass, Arakan,
Burma [Myanmar]
at his early death one of the most
promising Welsh poets, who described his
experiences as an enlisted man and then an
officer during World War II.
The son of a schoolmaster, Lewis grew up
in a mining valley of South Wales, where he
forged a bond of sympathy with the
impoverished coal miners. Scholarships
enabled him to attend the universities of
Aberystwyth and Manchester. He worked as a
schoolteacher before entering the army
shortly after the outbreak of the war. Most
of the poems in Raiders’ Dawn (1942) are
about army life in training camps in
England, as are the short stories in The
Last Inspection (1942). Ha! Ha! Among the
Trumpets (1945) contains the verse he wrote
after leaving England for military duty in
the East, where he was killed. Letters from
India (1946) and Selected Poetry and Prose
(1966) were also published posthumously.
