[There] is no other modern English poet who raises such enthralling technical problems, or who (besides Eliot) seems to offer so deep an insight into what poetry is and can do [as David Jones]…. He is a unique, perhaps a difficult and certainly an original poet; the reward of his work is a gradual understanding of it which cannot be communicated. (pp. 80-1)

The special flavour of his poetry has continually become more intense, but it was already unmistakable in his long poem about the 1914 war. Since then his subject matter has ostensibly widened, he has become obsessed with the past, with prehistory, with human tradition and with local numina; the 1914 war, the Roman empire and mediaeval Wales have each of them furnished the raw material of his poetry; these themes have been important to him because they are the most present to his understanding of history and of modern life; his poetry is in a way a struggle to talk about the history of the world. (p. 81)

What is special to David Jones is the extraordinary variety and particularity of his language. It can be looked at in two ways: as an expression of all those local and historic diversities which his intelligence sets out to comprehend, and which his poetry does against every convention express, or simply as language, as the construction of a moral context as demanding, as multiple and as strong as that of Jonson's theatre, a concern with the texture of words and their effect on each other like that of figures and colours on a painting in progress, so that it has not been by chance that probably no writer since the time of Shakespeare has brought to bear so wide a range of the English language and such different levels of it inside a few pages. (pp. 81-2)

In Parenthesis opens with exact and comprehensive description: the language is deadpan and empirical, the effect is of gathering tension. The tension increases against the ominous notes of the poet's voice in propria persona, to which the darkest and most compassionate themes are reserved, but at the same time the unity of language is broken by phrases of common speech like Shakespeare's and by actual Shakespearen and epic references. There is a certain distancing into an epic and more religious world, in fact into another conception of life, but the perspectives are broken, the language is in tatters, you are startled by the reality and particularity of everything. The consolations of poetry and of religion diversify the levels of thought and language, but they are identical with the tragic foreground. In this connection it is important that the principal religious thoughts and feelings in David Jones' writings have to do with the Roman Mass, which is itself in a profound sense poetic and historical. The Anathemata in which this emerges is not so sharp and terrible a book as In Parenthesis but there is a certain epic bleakness in it, and even its triumphant passages, like the closing passages in In Parenthesis, are orchestral from a vocabulary of dark sounds. (p. 82)

David Jones' feeling for language of this sort is rather like his passion for the proper and popular names of things, which extends from military equipment to the technical language of geology and archaeology. Fragments of dead and dying languages sometimes seem to him somehow magical, and in his use of them they become so….

In his recent work the genuine snatches of remembered conversation which occur in In Parenthesis have given place to a compacted language, more economic but less urgently appealing, which is spoken by Roman soldiers and in which a mass of popular traditions is embedded…. Already in David Jones' poetry some of the common peoples' sentences are old-fashioned: like the diversities of place and cult that he so treasures, diversities of language are being ironed out. Of course such sentences as "Move them long York loins o'yorn" seem to be unkillable and are always cropping up, but we are committed to the end game of late capitalism, the progress of the world is irreversable, and the popular imagination and popular tradition that have guarded, nourished and recreated this diversity are perhaps beginning to dry up. This is at least a legitimate fear, and the fear conditions the way in which these beautiful scraps and tatters of speech are cherished and reused. (p. 83)

One of the lessons of David Jones' poetry is that with any less degree than his of fraternity and humanity, an epic impersonality becomes impossible. The strength of his poetry is its dealing directly with vast and serious themes; this poetry is very individual, but it should not be seen as eccentric; it was only through a fragmentation of language learnt from Joyce and intuitively applied to the ungovernable memory of the 1914 war, through obscure knowledge and extreme curiosity and particularity, that it was possible for him to speak of this kind of reality at all, to use this kind of word and phrase at all….

[David Jones' poetry] is marked by an extreme, even a difficult precision. The Anathemata certainly needs several readings, and one can grasp the precise relations of words only after mastering the material in the notes. Fortunately the notes are most interesting even if there were no text, so this is not a painful process. Any poet who needs to be precise and particular over an enormous range of language as well as facts must necessarily make such a demand. (p. 85)

There are parts of In Parenthesis which I personally find it unbearable to read often and which I cannot read without tears. The context that is built up operates in the way of all poetry, resting its prolonged force on what had seemed simple phrases. A sentence that in its context takes on a frightful power is the ordinary military order 'And don't bunch on the left for Christ's sake.' It comes as a sudden and therefore startling piece of direct speech at a moment of tight tension, and the oath breaks the surface of the language in both a very dramatic and another way. (pp. 86-7)

There is an instructive contrast between David Jones and a very different writer, but one of the few certainly great modern poets, Constantine Cavafy. Cavafy's language is individual, and although he is a thousand miles from Joyce and had not, I suppose read Laforgue, he does (for different reasons) write on more than one level of language at a time. Also he writes about the late Roman world, his principal source being Gibbon's Decline and Fall. A seminal book for David Jones must I think have been Spengler's Decline of the West, which he has certainly not followed at a theoretic level, but the disturbed visions of which have perhaps haunted him. Cavafy writes with economy, and a rumbling, very strong irony, through which he breaks with direct and startling personal speech, and a sensuous power which in its way is without parallel. Each of these elements can exist only because of the others, and they strengthen and sharpen each other…. David Jones' Romans are old soldiers of the Boer War or 1914; their language is strong and strange; things are lightened or darkened not by the heroic past but by what is numinous, local and sweet, a reminiscence of a Welsh or British hill-cult; what they do is as terrible as what is done to them; it is the difference between Alexandria and North Wales: the contrast is not one of merit. (p. 87)