During the month of November 1917, Private David Jones, serving on the Western Front with the 15th (London Welsh) Battalion of the Royal Welch Fusiliers, wrote a short narrative entitled The Quest for his 1918 New Year’s card. In it, a young knight is advised to fight always for “liberty” and never for personal gain. Should a prince offer him great reward, the knight should “cry scorn upon him and his province”:

But if one grey-headed shall cry unto thee, saying, “Fair Sir, they have taken from me the only ox that I had, and despoiled me of mine only...

One of the most demanding aspects of David Jones’s poetry is its dense allusiveness, and its allusions to Welsh tradition in particular go well beyond the backgrounds of most modern readers. Wales figures in his imagination as a historical symbol of cultural wholeness and vitality, one consistently identified with the Middle Ages in his poetry and critical prose. Learning to read Jones is in part a process of learning to make unfamiliar Welsh names and texts meaningful. The dense footnotes reflect his acknowledgment of the difficulties involved; as Cairns Craig observes of Yeats’s use of Irish names, Jones’s Welsh allusions...

If Y Gododdin marks the inner circle of the traddodiad, which expands outward to include the tales of The Mabinogion, with Malory skirting its outermost limits, Le Chanson de Roland lies well outside its compass, emerging out of the continental experience of Charlemagne’s Christian empire and the threat posed by Moslem expansion in the early Middle Ages. David Jones’s friend, the historian Christopher Dawson, sees in the Chanson “the old heroic tradition in the process of transformation under the influence of new religious ideals.”¹ The Chanson provides Jones with the concluding lines of In Parenthesis and underlies Jones’s depiction of...

The publication of James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in 1916 brought the aesthetic theories of the Middle Ages into the mainstream of modern literature through Stephen Dedalus’s remarkable variation on Aquinas in conversation with his friend Lynch. While postmodern theorists such as Umberto Eco have generally viewed Scholastic aesthetics as a closed, historically determined system, Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus, the philosopher Jacques Maritain, and David Jones all developed their poetics out of Scholastic philosophy, generating aesthetic theories to meet the demands made by modernity on art. The major source of neo-Scholastic theory for Jones was...

David Jones’s peripheral status in relation to the academic canon stands in stark contrast to his enduring legacy as both influence and inspiration among contemporary poets, particularly in Britain and Ireland. Elizabeth F. Judge offers the most sustained and theoretically informed account of Jones’s exclusion from the modernist canon, but her often incisive analysis does not account for his continuing influence on other writers. A less institutionally bound understanding of canonicity, one that takes into account poetic influence (anxious and otherwise), can more easily accommodate the work of Jones and allow us to see his significance for contemporary poetry. In...