The lost Modernist who wrote the next Finnegans Wake

Though David Jones, a painter and poet, was lauded by the likes of T.S. Eliot and W.H. Auden, he never earned mainstream critical acclaim. In light of the reprinting of his two book-length poems, In Parenthesis and The Anathemata, David Wheatley from the New Statesman explores why Jones may have slipped into obscurity. Jones was a war poet who became disillusioned with war, briefly flirted with Fascism, and had an ear for the cadences of the common soldier though his writing was experimental and relatively oblique. Wheatley compares Jones’ “mythopoetics” to the cryptic prose of Finnegan’s Wake. Whether or not Jones is a would-be literary giant, Wheatley believes reading him should be required: “to open a book by David Jones is to walk in the ley lines of his dreaming, a dreaming offered to believer and non-believer alike.”

From the New Statesman:

Jones thought the task of the artist is to "lift up valid signs": the "Anathemata" of his singular 1952 masterpiece are "things set up, made over to the gods". Water, he observes, is called "the 'matter' of the Sacrament of Baptism", but could the same be said for "two of hydrogen and one of oxygen"? This is not the usual post-Romantic deprecation of science, but part of a larger attempt to re-enchant the physical, historical and mythic underpinnings of the modern world.

Auden compared Jones's method to Saint-John Perse, while noting the Anglo-Welsh poet's earthier attachments. If Auden could confess he did not "get" a lot of the poem, small shame should attach to readers unable to reduce passages such as the following to paraphrasable content: "Past where the ancra-man, deeping his holy rule/in the fiendish marsh/at the Geisterstunde/on Calangaeaf night/heard the bogle-baragouinage." Its densely layered mythopoetics make The Anathemata not just a sequel to Finnegans Wake, but a potent influence on contemporary myth-makers from Ted Hughes to Iain Sinclair and Alice Oswald . . .