NOT THE MONKEE

World of books: a Welsh poet fired by the forces of conservatism (A N Wilson, 30/06/2003, Daily Telegraph)

The great poets have nearly all been conservatives, even if, like Wordsworth, they took a little time to recognise the fact. It is not
surprising. Their task, since the composition of The Iliad, has been to encapsulate emotions, stories and myths as they fade from consciousness: an essentially conservative exercise.

David Jones (1895-1974), calligrapher, painter, visionary and author of those two transcendent masterpieces, In Parenthesis and The Anathemeta, has a firm band of admirers; yet he
remains outside the canon of literature studied for A-level or university courses.

No doubt this is because a year or two spent studying Jones's work, as well as filling the student's head with Jones's two masterpieces, would also bring so many other things into focus: the First World War and its terrible consequences; but also, those things from which young minds are nowadays protected - the Christian liturgy and the whole history of our islands, filtered through Roman archaeology, classical literature and Celtic myth.

Jones's work is a palimpsest. As you read, you find layers of memory and reference peeping through one another. One of the templates that he uses to understand experience is the shape of the liturgy, that Mass of the Western Church whose destruction in the late Sixties caused him so much grief.

Both In Parenthesis and The Anathemeta quote frequently from the Mass, not merely its words but its rubrics - meaningless now, one presumes, except to a handful of faddists:

Here, in this high place,
into both hands
he takes the stemmed dish
as in many places
by this poured and that held up
Wherever their directing glosses read
Here he takes the victim. [...]

Like his two Modernist masters, Pound and Eliot, he was passionately conservative.

In Parenthesis, like Pound's Cantos or Eliot's The Waste Land, quotes snatches of liturgy, legend, history and literature because it shares the sense of the First World War having blown "Old Europe" to smithereens - its buildings, artefacts, values and shrines.

David Jones's work helps us to know whether we can still use the word "sacred", and if we do so, what it means. Unlike our Prime Minister, and so many modern Christians, this artist-visionary takes it for granted that to break away from the past is tragic.

Eliot biographer Lyndall Gordon put that last a tad more artfully: "To lose what is not a waste land is the very condition of being in a waste land."

Unfortunately Anathemeta appears to be out of print and neither of Hanover's bookstores has In Parenthesis. Two more for the unending list.

We did find some more information about David Jones though:


MORE:
-AUDIO READING: Tom Durham reads from Wedding Poems by David Jones (Enitharmon Press)
-The David Jones Society
-Artist/poet David Jones (Modernism: American Salons)
-David Jones (1895-1974) (Anthem for Doomed Youth, Imperial War Museum)
-First World War.com - Prose & Poetry - David Jones
-The David Jones Society: David Jones: Text, Texture and Intertextuality: A three day International Conference at Swansea Institute of Higher Education 13th to 15th September 2002 (Welsh Arts Archive)
-David Jones (Wikipedia)
-ESSAY: World of books: A N Wilson on a Welsh poet fired by the forces of conservatism (A N Wilson, 06/30/2003, Daily Telegraph)
-ESSAY: David Jones: the Poet?s Place and the Sleeping Lord (Brad N. Haas, Flashpoint)
-ESSAY:  "Leave it—under the oak." (Harold B. Lee Library)
-ESSAY: WAR POETS I: DAVID JONES (Language Hat, April 16, 2003)
-ESSAY: Behind the Lines on the 65th Anniversary of Ivor Gurney's death (Roderic Dunnett, December 2002)
-REVIEW: of In Parenthesis by David Jones (Complete Review)
-REVIEW: of The Anathemata by David Jones (Complete Review)
-REVIEW: of The Anathemata by David Jones (Michael Symmons Roberts, Daily Telegraph)
-REVIEW: of The Anathemata by David Jones (W. H. Auden, NY Review of Books)
-REVIEW: of Wedding Poems by David Jones (David Wheatley, The Guardian)
-REVIEW: of David Jones: Writer and Artist by Keith Alldritt (Noel Malcolm, Daily Telegraph)




GENERAL:
-Poets of the Great War
-Poetry of the First World War (Europe's Journey) Posted by Orrin Judd at July 9, 2003 9:25 PM