[David Jones's conversion to Catholicism in 1921] seems to have come about not through deep psychic struggle, not through pangs of conscience or intense sense of personal need, but through aesthetic theory. It was deep intellectual curiosity and critical investigation of the origins and continuing meaning of the arts, rather than concern for the soul or eternity, which brought Jones to his decision…. [His] Catholicism is secondary to his Welshness, though the two are mutually complementary and integrated wholly in his art. All of Jones's life and work was to be directed to the fulfilling of his vision of Catholic ideas in art; his poetry, particularly that following In Parenthesis, is a tenacious and dedicated affirmation of his Catholic subscription. (pp. 19-20)

[The essay "The Myth of Arthur" is a major piece] and displays erudition and scholarship of a uniquely imaginative variety. That is, Jones is concerned not merely to trace in chronological fashion the origins and various renditions of the story of Arthur, but more importantly to weave among those sources of "historical mythus" to see what significance the myth has had in Western history and if and how it can be seen to retain significance for moderns. He touches upon or reviews, as it were, the varied theories in scholarship as to the origins of Arthur, but his own contribution is not to quarrel with or quibble over details of "fact" or chronology or influence or literary "borrowing"; rather it is to enquire and attempt to answer just "how came this ruling-class Romano-Briton … to be the focal point of medieval romance in Britain, France, Germany, indeed all the West?"…

Jones is concerned not to elevate Arthur in a narrow nationalistic way, but to see him in his many shapes…. (p. 37)

The Arthurian material is not for Jones of mere academic interest; it is one of his most important background sources and referents. But beyond even that it is central to his whole vision of man in twentieth-century civilization…. Jones proposes that in the figure of Arthur-Christ, "from the machine age the strayed machine-men may create a myth patient of baptism."… It is at least his hope. He does not consciously promote himself as a modern Malory or as the poet best qualified by ancestry or history to revitalize Arthur for his time, but the qualities he perceived in Malory are the standards he set for himself…. (p. 40)

Jones can be described as neither literary critic nor historian, though the prose writing in Epoch and Artist include a great deal of history, political and literary, and he does occasionally make judgments of the writings of other artists. He was not a social critic, nor was he a professional theologian or philosopher of aesthetics. He was a practicing artist, a practicing Roman Catholic; and while he enlisted the language of one subscription in support of the other and applied the language of both to the outer world, the war, specifically, and his "civilizational situation" in the world of technocracy, he did not invoke them on behalf of capitalized High Culture or political morality or action. He was both Welsh and British without being intense and chauvinist. Art for him is not to be seen as a trickle-down system; it is the one great equalizer, the one possession common to all men, the sole valid mediator between God and man. (p. 48)

In many places In Parenthesis reads like a traditional prose novel. That is, characters act and react in normal, realistic ways; they speak and are spoken to, command and obey; think of past, present, or future; muse, daydream, have the requisite bodies, souls, and spirits. Time passes apace as directed by the author; conventions of grammar and syntax prevail; and the controlling hand of an omniscient narrator is firmly in evidence…. There is, however, another style much in evidence: rapid-fire, idiomatic, unidentified by speaker, a confusion of voices all clamoring for attention. This, too, is a kind of "realism"….

And again there is a highly allusive, esoteric, and "scholastic" poetry, far removed (by the test of realism) from the idiom of private soldiers' speech in the trenches but carrying a special burden of mythic reference and meaning…. (p. 53)

[In Parenthesis] in some senses can be described in familiar, conventional terms. That is, it has purposeful movement in time and action, recognizable human characters and landscape, and a definable subject of man at war. It is arranged broadly in a linear, chronological sequence, and details the movement of a group of men in arms of all ranks from the staging grounds in England (Part 1) to their destiny seven months later in the trenches at the Somme (Part 7)…. Jones uses, and uses with careful artistry, all the devices available to the modern poet and novelist: flashback and ahead, the "free association" of stream-of-consciousness writing, shifting point of view, abrupt juxtaposition and interpolations of speech, image, character, and scenes, which is to say nothing of his allusions to centuries distant persons and events and use of words and phrases from Latin, Welsh, French, and German.

Private 25201 Ball standing in, as it were, for Private David Jones in memory, is the central figure, but "protagonist" is too strong a word to describe his role, and he is certainly not a "hero" in any traditional sense of the word…. The point, and it is an important distinction, must be made that the relative "importance" of the characters lies not in their perceived relationships and dealings with each other but in the attention David Jones pays to them, the use he makes of them, as voices or recording sensibilities. They are made to bear a heavy load of referential mythic weight, and the problem Jones has posed for himself is to see that their immediate, recognizable humanity is not diminished or obscured by their other, more "poetic" uses. In Parenthesis bears no resemblance to a "fox-hole" novel in which characters learn to live, love, hate, fight, and perhaps die together and in which the reader is given characteristic or stereotypical "specimens."… "Archetypal" serves better to describe Jones's semifictional creations; the racial or mythic ancestry that Jones provides for them places them in the whole history of recorded time; they share the human psyche of the soldiers at Catraeth, at the Crucifixion, at Malplaquet, at Harfleur, wherever man has organized war against his own kind.

In Parenthesis is a poetic enactment of tradition and the individual in war in which today's action modifies our concepts and understanding of history and its wars, in which the actions and thoughts of David Jones's Private Ball modify our understanding of all the Privates Ball of the past, even as they of the recoverable past exert an inexorable influence on behavior today. David Jones is not a reporter, an admiring spectator, not a public-relations man for pacifism or for militarism. In chronicling the action of which he was a part, he does not seek to be an epic poet singing hymns of battle in which new heroes reenact the earth-shaking deeds of their ancestors. Without apology or special pleading, he details from intimate firsthand acquaintance with the present—and from affectionate intimacy with historical man—the minds and actions of those compelled, for whatever reason, whatever "accidents" of history and geography, to go "once more into the breach." In Parenthesis is not a poem either to provoke or to end a war … except as it adds to the accumulation of testimony to the stupidities and brutality of history that each age must learn from or, more likely, ignore. (pp. 54-6)

[In addition to the military chain of command, there is] another parallel institution, coexistent, and ultimately of a higher order, that is introduced in Part 1, and it is one which, by repeated reference throughout the poem, is to become unmistakable, all-pervasive. This is the liturgical or religious order of things, and is to be discerned first in the identification of "the silence peculiar to parade grounds and refectories" and in such language as "the liturgy of a regiment departing." (p. 57)

In Parenthesis is, as Jones intended, a "shape in words," the color, agony, humour, irony, tedium, violence, sacrament, the experience of the war "re-presented." Familiar, unfortunately, in its subject, it is unique in its telling. The art is grounded firmly in Jones's personal experience, and in language has that "necessary liaison with the concrete" that Jones so admired in Malory. The result abides quibblings and demurrers about technique or "difficulty"; it is one of the most important pieces of writings to have come from the 1914–1918 War. (pp. 72-3)

The Anathemata does not have the confined narrative structure or the clear identification with classical epic of In Parenthesis; more ambitious, certainly, than that work, it attempts something approaching the whole cultural history of the British Isles. "What I have written has no plan, or at least is not planned," Jones writes; "if it has a shape it is chiefly that it returns to its beginning."… To read it is to engage, in a rare, esoteric way, from a most learned and demanding tutor, in a course in Western Civilization, which is something other than learning the sites of famous battles in Greece and being able to recite, in order, the rulers of Rome and the kings and queens of England. Ideally, it is to discover via surviving art and artifact and written word, and with application of all the modern insights and methods of literary study, anthropology, comparative religion, and linguistics, the essential human heritage that is ours…. The whole gesture of the poem, its whole rhetoric, is in the way of a question, or the putting, as it were, of a proposition, It lacks, deliberately, that purposeful grounding in experience, that kind of "necessary liaison with the concrete" that so informed In Parenthesis; in The Anathemata the intimate bodily apprehension of the trench experiences gives way to intellectual and spiritual musings and probings of the "Real Presence," as it were, of the Roman Mass.

Even with the aid of the preface and the "apparatus," The Anathemata remains for most a difficult poem…. Footnotes are lavish; they are prominently (if conveniently) displayed at the bottom of the page, where possible; in other instances they run to occupy a page and more in their own right. The thirty-four-page preface appears a little foreboding; seven of the nine illustrations are inscriptions in Latin. There is a total of 244 pages, which is a forbidding number for most twentieth-century readers of poetry. And there is the appearance of the poem on the page, seemingly the freest of free verse, with odd, irregular line length, and some prose narrative interspersed. The language is always demanding; not only are there words taken intact from Latin, Greek, German, Anglo-Saxon, and Welsh, but there are also words in English that are hardly commonplace…. The allusions, even when elucidated by footnote, are rare and esoteric….

The poem is partially autobiographical in that it is composed of the meandering thoughts, the persistent, groping questions of a mind very much like and to be identified with David Jones's…. The progress of [the Mass] provides one of the poem's unities; each prescribed gesture and act performed by the priest stirs thoughts in both the conscious, and all levels of subconscious, states of the silent observer-worshiper. Another unity is provided by the chronology of events covered by this quasi-free associative method, the history of the world from the farthest reaches of pre-history to the local history of Britain—Wales, in particular—and the promise of a redeemed future first made possible for Britain by the coming of Christianity. These larger outlines enclose, define, and carry the poem, though there are other themes and subthemes which persist throughout. (p. 75)

The preface to The Anathemata is one of Jones's most important essays in its own right, to be included with "Art and Sacrament" and "The Myth of Arthur" as central to an understanding of his mind and work. Its importance lies far beyond its worth as an introduction to the poem, the "fragments of an attempted writing" that make up The Anathemata. For in the preface Jones gathers his crucial ideas … concerning the nature of all art and of his own intentions and practice as a poet. (pp. 76-7)

For Jones the word ["anathemata"] is nearly synonymous with the Welsh "anoeth" or the "deposits" of one's culture, which are not necessarily, though the term might include, archaeological findings or artifacts. In the larger sense, man's "anathemata" define all that legacy of man that is his, that is he. (p. 77)

The Anathemata is a devoutly religious poem, and the preface is intended finally as prologue to that poem and, by extension, to all of Jones's works, his artifacts, his deposits remade into things sacra, gathered and offered as the poet's Mass—not for the remission of sins but for art's sake, which is to say, for man's sake. (p. 81)

Clearly, it is the whole of human history and prehistory as perceived and experienced by Western man that is Jones's province in The Anathemata. In intention and performance the poem will withstand criticism's severest, most demanding tests of high seriousness and moral exactitude. In intention and performance it is governed, however, by the restrictions of its religious and national bias or authorial predispositions. To say this is not to use the word "restrictions" pejoratively; it is to isolate for further examination the conditioning forces working on, in, and through the poem that Jones, before anyone, would acknowledge. What makes The Anathemata significant, and significantly different, are two determining factors: first, it is informed and defined throughout by a Christian, or, more exclusively, a Roman Catholic point of view; and second, Jones is writing as a Welshman, a London Welshman.

The cross and the unnamed priest at the altar occupy the sacramental center of the poem; the island of Britain and the poet, David Jones himself, occupy the geographical center. Standing, as it were, with one foot in Wales, one in London, is the poet, who is celebrant, or at least silent and attentive observer, at the Mass….

The Anathemata is a verse rendering of, a demonstration of, both a theory of poetry and a body of belief about the nature of man…. At its widest scope [its story] is the story of mankind on earth, his emergence from the reaches of prehistory, from rocks and caves that he decorated, as at Lascaux, adorning burial sites gratuitously, creating objects that are beautiful to an extrautile degree, and continuing, still an artmaker, to the wasted present, "at the sagging end and chapter's close." For David Jones, inextricably bound up with man's persistence as an art-making creature is the smaller story, that is potentially of infinitely wide, eternal scope, which is the "one tale to tell" of man's redemption by the gratuitous intercession of Christ on the Cross. At the center of The Anathemata is that cross, the "Axile Tree."… [Christ] validated the cross as man's artwork; Christ being lifted up made an efficacious sign, made "anathemata" of his own body. (pp. 95-6)

Jones's concern is to go beyond, if it is possible, the Mass as "merely" celebratory of the body and blood of Christ, and to see it as signifying the whole odyssey of the human experience on earth. Whether one believes that the events recorded in the Christian gospel actually happened or not, or whether or not he believes that Christ was the Son of God, as He claimed to be, really matters little, for Western man's whole being, his history, his ancestry, his "res," is wholly bound up in the myth. Jones establishes in The Anathemata that the art of the first Eucharist at the Last Supper redefines all preceding art, even as it was an act that with all its reverberations and implications transformed succeeding events and imparted a unique and new order to Western myth, legend, and history. The poem's last lines lead us from this present time … back again to the Creation, to the oreogenesis of foretime. While the final event referred to is the Crucifixion, that act is to be seen as the confirmed and eternally valid lifting up of a sign that actually resignifies events that preceded it. (pp. 96-7)

[If] man is distinguished from the angels and the beasts by his ability to create art, he is distinguished further by his lone passion for organized mass violence. In Parenthesis tested the military and liturgical forms of order and found them lacking, with neither efficacy for salvation nor effectiveness for survival. The Queen of the Woods, the great earth-goddess, the eternal female principle venerated by myth throughout the centuries, alone could restore order—but post mortem. In The Anathemata Jones renominates and celebrates the liturgy as the redemptive order for the living, as an art form. (p. 97)

In intention and scope Jones's poem is truly epic and might be said to rival in ambition Milton's attempt to "justify the ways of God to Men" for an age which urges art to be at the service of the ego, the State, or itself. In Jones's scheme of divine and universal things, "art for art's sake," were he to endorse Wilde's phrase, would reverberate with the utmost seriousness. In the Eucharist is central order, the ordering principle of art…. (pp. 97-8)

It is very difficult with David Jones to speak of sequential "progress" or "development" in his work…. Jones was past forty when his first written work was published, and he was by that time a mature artist, thinker, Catholic, man. Clearly there was a major step forward in The Anathemata (1952), but the fragments of The Sleeping Lord volume, variously dated from 1937 to the time of his death in 1974, do not submit to chronological discovery or ordering. The poems published in the twenty post-Anathemata years represent less an advance of theme or perspective than a backing and filling in of detail; each fragment has its place in the tapestry that is Jones's life-work…. [The] poetry is in the detail, often surprising, always precise in its concrete sign and evocation. The best of these fragments—"The Tutelar of the Place," "The Tribune's Visitation," "The Hunt" (happily one each from the mythic, Roman, and Arthurian groups)—succeed in that precision of frame, action, language, and perspective; it is not just that they are shorter or simpler than the epics…. [The] fragments of The Sleeping Lord point to, open up, and provide an access to The Anathemata. (p. 120)

Jones shares with Eliot and Pound a verse style characterized by its eschewal of clear narrative continuity, and by its use of esoteric allusions, abrupt juxtapositions, relative freedom in language(s), idioms, syntax, and verse forms. But with Pound the comparison stops quickly. "Cantos" is a term far more elevated than "fragments," and there is no shortage of them. In total conception they are perhaps a far more ambitious undertaking, though to what end they point or what solution they propose is far from clear. More documentary than doctrinal, Pound has no patience to try to rescue Western civilization,… and there is a world of difference between the poet who idealized Mussolini and David Jones, whose vision is of a resurrected King Arthur cum Christ. (p. 136)

Jones might well have admired Pound's techniques, though he did not read Pound until after publishing The Anathemata and did not write on him. He shares with Pound the practice of yoking violently together the idiom of the common man and the highly allusive esoterica of the scholar; but Jones's "low" idiom is never as low as Pound's, nor does he reach out to such diverse connections as [Pound's] …; nor does he parade himself as did Pound…. The fundamental difference between Jones and Pound lies, I think, in their vision, which might start from the observation that the civilization lies in ruins but proceeds in radically different ways to establish what must be preserved. For Jones, the "answer" lies wholly within the Western tradition—of monarchy, Celtic matriarchy, deep-rootedness, and Christianity; and in that context his immediate mentor is T. S. Eliot. (pp. 136-37)

The "I" that might be the poetic voice of David Jones is scarcely ever discernible at all [in contrast with Eliot's voice throughout his poetry]; and there is scarcely a discernible public "I" of David Jones that would contend with or even be acknowledged in the same context as Eliot's—the voice of the editor, reviewer, essayist, and critical sage of the century. The interrogative voice and voices of The Waste Land have their equivalents in The Anathemata, but Jones's verse does not "testify" as does Eliot's to his conversion and its efficacy…. Jones is not concerned to exercise aloud the question, "What must I do to be saved?"… The Four Quartets are simultaneously personal and confessional and allusive and "historic," whereas Jones rigidly eschewed the personal pronoun "I."… [Surely] the "I" has a mediating function. It appears in Jones only in his prefaces and notes and occasional essays; Eliot learned to integrate it with his meditations on the past in the poetry. This is to point out the differences between the poets, in their most mature, sustained works, not to insist that Jones should have "imitated" Eliot; perhaps finally it is not the autobiographical "I" so much as a firm narrative stance or voice which serves as other than a masked exhibitor of historical deposits that is lacking in much of Jones's work. (pp. 137-38)

Joyce was both Catholic and Celtic, like Jones; also like Jones, his medium had to be English…. [For] Jones the perceived greatness of Joyce lay in his "proper understanding of the Catholic mind …"…. (p. 139)

Jones was by contrast far more self-critical and diffident, as the whole publishing history of his "fragments" in various stages of noncompletion testifies. Having once marked out the plot of ground he was to explore for further excavation and refining, Jones was the most patient and fastidious "propspector." He was that kind of loner or exile from the workaday concerns of the civilization he wished to reclaim. Both poets (the distinctions between poetry and prose being as blurred in Jones as in Joyce) were the products of those historical "accidents" which made them occupy "as it were junctional or terminal positions" in their time. (p. 140)

Jones lacks perhaps that truly radical energy that is so characteristic of Joyce's writings; he recognizes full well the authentic signa of the past, presents and re-presents them, justifies them, pleads for them. The remaining critical question is whether or not he succeeded in reinvigorating them and charging them anew with "instress." There have been few writers of this or any age so resolutely uninterested in matters of public reputation or recognition. David Jones's life work is finally his testimony to this central credo: "We were then homo faber, homo sapiens before Lascaux and we shall be homo faber, homo sapiens after the last atomic bomb has fallen."… (pp. 140-41)

Samuel Rees, in his David Jones (copyright © 1978 by G. K. Hall & Co.; reprinted with the permission of Twayne Publishers, A Division of G. K. Hall & Co., Boston), Twayne, 1978.