By DAVID WHEATLEY [New Statesman] – If posterity has consigned the poet-painter David Jones (1895-1974) to obscurity, it is an obscurity of a strangely enviable kind. Most writers in need of a revival have suffered critical neglect or have fallen out of print, but that has not been Jones’s fate. T S Eliot, Hugh MacDiarmid, Basil Bunting and W H Auden all garlanded him with superlatives; academic attention has remained steady; and his two book-length long poems, In Parenthesis and The Anathemata, have just been reissued. Yet Jones is an undeniably marginal figure, British poetry’s very own Easter Island statue, combining cultic mystery with apparent obsolescence. In Parenthesis is one of the masterpieces of modern war poetry, but much discussion of war poetry simply bypasses him.

Philip Larkin pronounced him “about as good as Richard Aldington” and omitted him from his Oxford Book of 20th-Century English Verse (published in 1973). Christopher Ricks’s 1999 Oxford Book of English Verse repeats the exclusion. In the age of the slim volume of poems, his style of ultra-allusive, polyglot epic looks more quixotic than ever, but no less impressive for that. Is this a writer in the unusual position of having not sunk, but risen without trace?

Continued at the New Statesman | In Parenthesis: Introduction by T.S.Eliot | More Chronicle & Notices.