- 6 x 9.
- 224pp.
- Hardcover
- 1994
- Available
- 978-0-472-10468-0
Add to Cart
- $79.95 U.S.
The British poet and artist David Jones (1895-1974), much praised in his lifetime by such important contemporaries as T.S. Eliot and W.H. Auden, is only now beginning to receive the attention that his challenging and carefully wrought work deserves. Jones saw his own era as "the turn of a civilization": a pivotal moment in Western history when a once unified and humane culture, rooted in nature and ritual, was in the midst of corruption, losing its sacred center. He was perhaps best known in his lifetime for his long poem In Parenthesis (1937), which draws on the poet's experience in the trenches of the First World War. Jones's later work is an ongoing exploration of his fascination with the mythic and religious themes already evident in this early poem. His last volume, The Sleeping Lord and Other Fragments (1974), affirms the enduring value of native cultural traditions against the dehumanizing tendencies of imperialism.
At the Turn of a Civilization examines Jones in the context of modernism, comparing his vision of history as an "order of signs" to T.S. Eliot's nostalgia for "tradition" and Ezra Pound's call for a "new paideuma." Jones believed that in the act of making art that embodies and "re-calls" the past, the poet affirms, even creates, an abiding continuity with what is deepest and most valuable in human experience—even in a world overrun by industrialism and imperialism. This "sacramentalist" view of poetry informs Jones's use of myth and history, his use of "masculine" and "feminine" imagery, and his anti-imperialist vision.
Contents
Prologue: "At the Turn of a Civilisation" 1
Part 1. "Tradition," "Paideuma," "Order of Signs"
Chapter 1. Past and Present: Jones and the Modernists 7
Chapter 2: "Art and Sacrament" 39
Chapter 3: "Singing Where He Walks": Making and Remembering in In Parenthesis 51
Chapter 4. "Making This Thing Other": The Anathemata 69
Part 2. "Rite Follows Matriarchate": Reenvisioning Myth
Introduction to Part 2: The Maker and the Myth 85
Chapter 5. The Wasted Land and the Queen of the Woods: From In Parenthesis to The Book of Balaam's Ass 89
Chapter 6. Imagining History: Spengler, Dawson, and Joyce 117
Chapter 7. "Her Fiat Is Our Fortune": Feminine Presences in The Anathemata 139
Chapter 8. Open Questions: The Sleeping Lord 159
Conclusion: "Before His Time?": The Jones Legacy 183
Notes 195
Works Cited 205
Index 213