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{"id":18481,"date":"2016-10-28T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2016-10-28T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/leithart.level2d.com\/?p=224"},"modified":"2016-10-28T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2016-10-28T00:00:00","slug":"david-jones","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/leithart\/2016\/10\/david-jones\/","title":{"rendered":"David Jones"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

I<\/span>n a TLS essay<\/a> on the Welsh poet David Jones, A.N. Wilson traces Jones\u2019s poetic impulses back to World War I: \u201cThe First World War in general, the Battle of the Somme in particular, became Jones\u2019s imaginative habitation for the rest of his life, as a visual artist and as a poet. In a prescient note to his Somme poem, In Parenthesis<\/em>, he describes how, even in 1917, he and a friend (Leslie Poulter) imagined tourists traipsing over the battlefield\u2014\u2018I recall feeling very angry about this, as you do if you think of strangers ever occupying a house you live in.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Wilson compares Jones to William Blake: \u201cJones left a triple legacy: he was a visual artist of supreme originality and skill . . . . He was secondly a poet of genius. W. H. Auden believed that Jones\u2019s The Anathemata<\/em> was \u2018very probably the finest long poem written in English this century.\u2019\u201d Finally, and most Blakean, Jones was a \u201cvisionary,\u201d one might almost say, a mystic.<\/p>\n

The mystical vision infuses the poetry. Of Anathemata<\/em>, Wilson writes that it \u201ccan be read as a sort of patchwork or commonplace book \u2013 Arthurian legend, Stone Age archaeology, Romano-British history, woven into thoughts about the origins of the Eucharist. Read it more than half a dozen times, however, and the randomness of the offerings seems less random; the connections begin to make sense; one thing in history illuminates another, whether it antedates or post-dates it in linear time.\u201d It is \u201ca Christian cathedral of allusions, memories, speculation\u2014is to see the all-embracing significance of the Event stretching forwards and backwards.\u201d<\/p>\n

And it is a cathedral in which everything coheres at one point: \u201cthe sixth-century BC carving of Rhonbos on the Acropolis, an exquisite marble depicting a man carrying a calf on his shoulders, is seen as a foreshadowing of the Good Shepherd. Hector dragged round the walls of Troy is a type of Christ\u2019s suffering outside the walls of Jerusalem. Helen of Troy, Guinevere, or \u2018Gwenhwyfar\u2019 in Welsh, and the Selene of Thule, all manifestations of what Goethe would have called \u2018das Ewig-Weibliche<\/em>,\u2019 allude to, and find their true fulfilment in, the Christian Theotokos.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"