List of the Works of John Cowper Powys

THE WORKS OF JOHN COWPER POWYS

POETRY

Poems
 LuciferWolf's Bane

Mandragora

Samphire

Horned Poppies: New Poems

Odes and Other Poems

LECTURES 

Visions and Revisions

One Hundred Best Books

Suspended Judgments

James Joyce's Ulysses, an appreciation

William Blake.

Dorothy M. Richardson

The Pleasures of Literature

Dostoievsky

Rabelais
 

PHILOSOPHY FOR LIVING

The Complex Vision
Psychoanalysis and Morality
The Religion of a Sceptic
The Secret of Self-Development
The Art of Forgetting the Unpleasant
The Meaning of Culture
Is Modern Marriage a Failure? A Debate [John Cowper Powys and Bertrand Russell]
In Defence of Sensuality
A Philosophy of Solitude
The Art of Happiness
Mortal Strife
The Art of Growing Old
Obstinate Cymric.
In Spite of: a Philosophy for Everyman 

 

THE NOVELS 

Wood and Stone

Rodmoor
After My Fashion
Ducdame

Wolf Solent
“The novel is a momentous piece of work . . . of transcendent interest and great beauty.” — The New York Times Book Review 

A Glastonbury Romance
Described as "the only novel produced by an English writer that can fairly be compared with the fictions of Tolstoy and Dostoyevski" by George Steiner in ‘The New Yorker’ and “The book of the century” by Margaret Drabble in ‘The Telegraph’. “A truly extraordinary novel. It stands out indeed in a most astonishing way from the great mass of present-day fiction: a very earthquake of a book, bewildering, if you like, shocking, even infuriating, yet incontestably great.... It is a big book, an important book.” — The Times

Weymouth Sands 
“It brings to mind the ... the romantic ferment of the film 'Les Enfants du Paradis' or ... one of the works of J.M.W. Turner.” — The Observer
 
Maiden Castle
  "His sense of encompassing nature and the living ever-present past, his power to convey curious states of mind, the beauty of his best writing, the exciting, erotic and cosmic scenes with which he alleviates his cosmic conceptions, could only come from a man possessed of superlative talent, genius, or (the word is inescapable with Powys) daemon.” — Times Literary Supplement

Owen Glendower 

Porius: A Romance of the Dark Ages
Writing in The New Yorker, George Steiner has said of the abridged Porius that it "combines [a] Shakespearean-epic sweep of historicity with a Jamesian finesse of psychological detail and acuity. Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!, which I believe to be the American masterpiece after Melville, is a smaller thing by comparison."

OTHER WORKS

The Owl, The Duck, and - Miss Rowe! Miss Rowe!
Morwyn, or, The Vengeance of God
The Inmates
Atlantis
The Brazen Head
Up and Out
Homer and the Aether
All or Nothing

AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL

Confessions of Two Brothers

An Englishman Upstate 

Autobiography
 “One of greatest 20th-century English novelists, John Cowper Powys is also the author of one of the greatest autobiographies ever written. Re-creating the lost worlds of late Victorian Dorset and early 20th-century America where he lived and worked, this mesmerisingly strange book shows Powys to be a kind of magical shape-shifter, eluding the reader - and perhaps himself - even as he engages the most reckless self-revelation.”  John Gray, author of Straw Dogs and Black Mass
  

Philosophy in Everyday Life

Most of us do not think about our lives and consequently we muddle through and often find ourselves living in a way that is at odds with what we really want or believe. The value of developing a philosophy for living is that is makes us think about our lives and live in a more directed way.

 

Conscious that the ordinary person generally associates the term philosophy with specialised thought and abstract concepts and theories, Powys broadened the definition and extended its use as a practical tool for use in daily life. Philosophy for him was not a thing apart, an academic subject for the lecture theatre, but the practical application of wisdom to everyday living.  He was not interested in professional philosophers and academic debates but in the average man and woman as they try to get through the daily struggles of work, family and life.  He took philosophy back to the street and  the ordinary person, to its original purpose as a practical tool that teaches us how to live to full and happy life.  Having developed a life-philosophy of his own, he believed he had discovered something that would aid ordinary people in their lives and he set about sharing it through his philosophical books.  

A life-philosophy is a tool for use in our daily living so it must be both personal and practical.  JCP based his life-philosophy on the writings of the great philosophers and classic writers and stressed that it is a practical philosophy, a tool for living, which could be used by each and every person in their daily lives.   He offers it  not as a ‘one size fits all’ solution to living but as a template that each person can use to tailor and suit their own personality and life circumstances. He stressed numerous times that we must not merely copy his philosophy in a dogmatic fashion but must tailor it to our own individual lives.  It is imperative that we each have ‘a philosophy of our own’.   To those prepared to accept the challenge, Powys takes the individual on a profound journey that can have life-changing effects on their life and happiness. It requires work in which the individual must become more reflective, creative and radical in their approach to life and this effort  is one of the reasons why so many people do not have a life-philosophy. But the work must be done if each person is to be contented, fulfilled and live an authentic and free life.    

JCP understood the lot of the ordinary man and woman living in a work-centred, materialistic world.  He lived in America at the time it was becoming the first modern industrial consumer society and  witnessed what we are ourselves see and experience now every day – people hurrying about “like ants on an ant-heap” working in unfulfilling jobs, grabbing what pleasure they could, consuming material goods yet remaining unhappy, restless and stressed.  The negative psychological, emotional and spiritual effects on people angered him for we are human beings, both deserving and capable of better things.  Powys did not aim to change society but assists the reader to change themselves for ultimately, all change begins with the individual.

If books teach us how to live then Powys’s writings do much to highlight the human situation and convinces us that a better way of living is possible and achievable.  It is a liberating and empowering message in which he reminds us of the power of the human mind and imagination to create change in our lives.  Although published between the 1920’s and 1950’s, Powys’s ideas are still relevant today as the issue of how to achieve a happy life is timeless and the extent of technological development, social change and economic boom and bust have increased and impacted even more on people’s lives.