Jones's visionary collection of poems and fragments published in the months before his death, reissued in paperback with a cover based on the artist's original design.
David Jones is regarded by many to be one of the great writers of the modern age. T.S. Eliot called "In Parenthesis" "a work of genius" and W.H. Auden wrote that "The Anathemata" "is probably the finest long poem written in English in this century". In addition to generous selections from these two book-length poems, this volume includes "The Tribune's Visitation", "The Tutelar of the Place", "The Hunt", and an except from the title poem from "The Sleeping Lord", the books Jones published shortly before his death.
Drawing on new archival discoveries, this book presents an authoritative reconstruction of David Jones's The Grail Mass, the unfinished and unpublished project from which came both his masterpiece The Anathemata – a work described by W.H. Auden as 'one of the most important poems of our times' – and The Sleeping Lord and other fragments, his final collection. With detailed commentary on the development and reconstruction of the text, this edition provides a full picture of Jones's literary endeavours over the second half of his life and further establishes his status as a major figure in the first wave of British modernist writers alongside T.S. Eliot and James Joyce. In addition to the text of The Grail Mass, this edition includes a number of unpublished fragments by Jones that emerged from this larger project, complete with textual commentaries.
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David Jones: A Christian Modernist? is a major reassessment of the work of the poet, artist and essayist David Jones (1895-1974) in light of the complex, ambiguous idea of a ‘Christian modernism’. His richly experimental and palimpsestic poetry, art and thought drew extensively on Christian tradition and symbolism as a key to the future: rejecting a technocratic and utilitarian modernity in favour of a revitalised culture of sign and sacrament. This volume examines historical influences on Jones’s development, his impassioned engagement with the idea of modernity and with modernist literature and art, the theological sources and resonances of his work, and contemporary or late-modern perspectives on his achievement.