Auden called English-Welsh poet-painter David Jones’s
Anathémata the greatest long poem of the 20th century—his review of the book can be read
here. I don’t know if Auden was right or not, but I do think that Jones belongs in this list and that the
Anathémata was his most important single piece of writing.
Jones subtitles his poem “Fragments of an Attempted Writing,” and in fact it is an arrangement of pieces. I can’t claim to have understood half of the poem, but I am drawn to it for its scope and energy and insight and break-through passages of beauty. It is a Joycean hodgepodge (Joyce was one of Jones’s favorite writers, although he came to his style independently) of western culture—Roman and Welsh and British history, Pleistocene cavemen, Helen of Troy, Christian liturgy, Arthurian legend, Welsh legend, and more. The poem’s language varies registers from street-slang to liturgical, with Latin and Welsh phrases thrown in along the way.
Jones’s early long poem
In Parentheses, which is based on his experience in the trenches in World War I, is earthier and much more accessible, and I might even have chosen that volume to represent Jones in this list, if I didn’t think that
Anathemata is more ambitious and far-reaching, more challenging to the presuppositions of an age. In the introduction to the poem, Jones says its subject is the “actually known and loved,” and what he means by this, I think, is our conscious relation to the artifacts of living—including, or even especially, artefacts of language (as a visual artist as well, Jones was a superb calligapher and engraver of letters). Jones constantly refers to the artist as a “sign-maker,” and struggled to find a language for this in an age that has no unified collective symbolic language. So he writes in the introduction to
Anathémata:
Quote:
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If the poet writes “wood” what are the chances that the Wood of the Cross will be evoked? Should the answer be “None,” then it would seem that an impoverishment of some sort would have to be admitted. It would mean that that particular word could no longer be used with confidence to implement, to call up or to set in motion a whole world of content belonging in a special sense to the mythus of a particular culture and of concepts and realities belonging to mankind as such. This would be true irrespective of our beliefs and disbeliefs. It would remain true even if we were of the opinion that it was high time the word “wood” should be dissociated with the mythus and conceps indicated. The arts abhor any loppings off of meanings or emtpyings out, any lessening of he totality of connotation, any loss of recession and thickness.
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In his writing Jones did as he did in
his visual art—he was a master in both forms: he arranged fragments of shattered western culture, not to “shore them up against our ruin,” as Eliot put it, but to call on collective memory of all of human life—past present and future—as contemporaneous.
There is a newer edition inprint from Faber, but the one with the cooler cover, with Jones’s engraved lettering, is
here.