David Jones - author of In Parenthesis, the great poem of World War I - is increasingly recognized as a major voice in the first generation of British modernist writers. Acclaimed by the likes of T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats, and W.H. Auden, his writing was deeply informed by his Catholic faith and Welsh blood.
This book makes available for the first time a number of previously unpublished statements by Jones that open new perspectives on his own work and the religious, political, and cultural engagements of British modernism more broadly. Annotated throughout, with detailed commentaries exploring the historical context of each document, the volume presents the restored text of Jones's essay on Hitler and includes a letter to Neville Chamberlain, an unfinished essay on Gerard Manley Hopkins, and the transcript of an interview with Jones a year before his death. These reveal an unknown side of Jones and give fresh insight into the influences and assumptions of 20th-century British literary culture.
David Jones (1895-1974) is acknowledged increasingly as a pioneering poet and visual artist ? This addition to the Jones corpus confirms those judgments while opening new lines of scholarly inquiry, particularly concerning his stances on crucial, and controversial, political issues of his era ? Kathleen Henderson Staudt provides a capacious, judicious historiographical survey that orients tyros to this burgeoning field while enriching veteran scholars' interpretations. Staudt's distilled edition of the Hopkins essay presents Jones's reflections on the Victorian poet-priest as a proleptic modernist and on the resultant "mystery" of profound affinities existing between artists separated by decades, even centuries. Thomas Berenato's exhaustive manuscript study of this article further includes cogent encapsulations of core aspects of Jones's worldview, especially his theology and aesthetics, many of which are reiterated in the 1973 interview and which informed his political outlook.
