David Jones (poet) - Poetry

Poetry

Although he had been trying to write about his wartime experiences for some time, it was not until 1937 that Jones published his first literary effort. In Parenthesis, which was published by Faber and Faber with an introduction by T. S. Eliot, was written in a mixture of verse and prose: it defies categorization as either poem or novel. Jones's literary debut won praise from critics and from fellow-poets such as Eliot and W.B. Yeats, as well as garnering the Hawthornden Prize in the following year. Jones's style can be described as High Modernism; the poem draws on literary influences from the 6th-century Welsh epic Y Gododdin to Thomas Malory's Morte d'Arthur to try to make sense of the carnage he witnessed in the trenches. An extract from In Parenthesis read by Jones himself in 1967 appears on the audiobook CD Artists Rifles.

His next book, The Anathemata, appeared in 1952 (again published by Faber). Inspired in part by a visit to Palestine during which he was struck by the historic parallels between the British and Roman occupations of the region, the book draws on materials from early British history and mythology and the history and myths of the Mediterranean region to explore the possibility of small cultures resisting the power of empire. The poem received mixed reviews, but was acclaimed by other literary artists such as W. H. Auden, Kathleen Raine and William Carlos Williams. Douglas Cleverdon produced dramatised readings of In Parenthesis and The Anathemata for the BBC Third Programme.

For the rest of his life Jones worked on a long poem, of which The Anathemata was intended to form part. Sections of the work were published mainly in the magazine Agenda, and in 1974 were published as The Sleeping Lord and Other Fragments (again under Faber's auspices). A posthumous volume of previously-unseen materials was edited by Harman Grisewood and René Hague and published by Agenda Editions as The Roman Quarry.

On 11 November 1985 Jones was among sixteen Great War poets commemorated on a slate stone unveiled in Westminster Abbey's Poet's Corner. The inscription on the stone was written by a fellow Great War poet, Wilfred Owen. It reads: "My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity."

In 2002 the text of three short poems was published for the first time in Wedding Poems, edited by Thomas Dilworth. Two of these poems ("Prothalamion" and "Epithalamion", amounting to 271 lines) had been written while Jones was living in London during the Blitz, for the marriage of Harman Grisewood to Margaret Bailey. The third poem, "The Brenner" (24 lines), had been written on 18 March 1940 to mark the meeting of Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler on the Brenner Pass. According to their editor publication of these poems brought into print "all the known completed poetry by David Jones".