After more study at St David's College, Lampeter,[1] he was ordained as a priest of the Church in Wales, serving from 1934 to 1938 as curate of Wrexham, then as rector of Llanuwchllyn with Llangywer, on the shore of Lake Bala in Merionethshire.
Compared by some with the writing of T. Gwynn Jones, who was also seen as a moderniser of Welsh prosody,[3] Bowen's early work (collected in Cerddi – 'Poems' – in 1957) is dense with layered imagery, and whilst later on he moved into free verse, it is actually difficult to chart his development in a linear way.
Not only was Bowen responsible for bringing into Welsh poetry influences from mainland Europe which effectively revolutionised the medium – in this he is in many ways to Welsh literature what T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound were to English – he is also of considerable interest in British poetry because his work with prose poems anticipates that of Geoffrey Hill (in Mercian Hymns) by a clear decade.
Comparable in stature with his fellow priest-poet R. S. Thomas, Bowen is, nevertheless, considerably more celebratory in tone, and the transformations in nature, as he sees them, often appear as communicating a personal revelation.
In the year after he retired Bowen published a selection of his poems, which included not only the Welsh-language originals but parallel English versions in verse.