[The Anathemata] is an attempt to create a kind of summa of poetic experience ranging through the world and time and has much in common with Pound's Cantos. The Weltanschauung of The Anathemata is one of a magnificent diversity, fundamentally optimistic and beautifully ordered. It is a coherent vision and one which—in contrast to much modern poetry—sees integration rather than disintegration as the chief characteristic of life.

The Anathemata is a work which defies attempts at classification. It shares the qualities of chronicle, epic, drama, incantation and lyric and is at the same time none of these and more than all put together. The poet himself defected in his own description of it as 'fragments of an attempted writing', and yet this does contain a necessary truth. He is right to call it an attempt—an attempt at a vision of Britain…. What distinguishes the Cantos or Finnegans Wake or Ulysses and The Anathemata is the fact that they are attempts to depict a universum; they represent a totality including the whole of history. This historical perspective, if the word is not too external in its connotations, is the animating force of The Anathemata, but it needs to be analysed before it can be properly understood. Wittgenstein said of philosophy that 'the problems are solved, not by giving new information, but by arranging what we have always known', and David Jones's 'attempted writing' can also be seen in these terms. He uses the data of history, the ever-accumulating fund of knowledge, and arranges them in such a way as to make them point to the dignity of labour in the diverse service of man and God. This last sentence puts brusquely and crudely one vital aspect of the poet's work, not only in The Anathemata, but also expressed in various essays, especially 'Art and Sacrament' and 'The Utile'. Nevertheless, it is important to be aware of this from the beginning, since the vision with which we are confronted is both strikingly positive and through and through Christian, two exceedingly unfashionable qualities for the mid-twentieth century. Perhaps only one firmly and deeply rooted in the Catholic tradition and with a keen awareness of what human creation demands could mould 'what we have always known' into a work of such subtle dimensions as David Jones has achieved. (pp. 101-02)

[In] his long preface to the book the poet quotes as shedding light on his own work a remark from the introduction to Nennius' Historia Brittonum: 'I have made a heap of all that I could find.' As regards the subject-matter, this is probably the most accurate summary, but St. Irenaeus provides the best antiphon—if I may use that ecclesiastical metaphor—on the techniques of organization of the subject-matter: 'Nihil vacuum neque sine signo apud Deum'. This dictum of a second century saint marks above everything the continuity of the tradition in which David Jones stands. In the Christian scheme the signs are, of course, related to God and Christ but the Correspondances of Baudelaire in substituting nature shows the continuing attractiveness of the idea apart from its specifically Christian use. It needs no special insight to point out that the sign, under the more usual name of 'image', is the most widely known and used device of poetic technique, but there are few writers who have explored and almost systematized its use with such telling effects as the author, who would probably prefer to be called the maker, of The Anathemata. The very word chosen as the title, glossed with such loving care and at such length in the preface … is indicative of the many strands of thought running through the fabric of the poet's vision…. (p. 103)

There is no clearly conceived centre to the work, or rather … the poem is a circle whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. For the important substance of the poem is to be found at every point in it. The direction and intention of the words are apparent from the start. The act of creation, the 'efficacious sign', is hymned in the very first words …:

We already and first of all discern him making this thing other. His groping syntax, if we attend, already shapes:

ADSCRIPTAM, RATAM, RATIONABILEM … and by pre-application and for them, under modes and patterns altogether theirs, the holy and venerable hands lift up an efficacious sign.

There is thus an extreme fluidity in the poem's structure of ideas. It is more like the sea with rivers running into it and islands than any building no matter how complicated; it is like the 'riverrun' of Finnegans Wake. And yet there are principles of construction about the work, as the division into eight named sections most clearly shows. (p. 107)

The Anathemata is concerned with both diversity and order, and it is intensely preoccupied with the particular. There is a precision and deliberateness about its language that exactly merits being called 'chiselled'. The details of observation, juxtaposition and association are, however, not there merely for themselves, but express beyond that an intuitive, even mystical knowledge of the oneness of life. The described object, the fragmentary quotation, the liturgical mood point beyond themselves; they are the signs and symbols of a fundamental harmony and unity. (p. 111)