David Jones on Art and Religion

Extract

To start on a personal note, let me say that while I see that the visual art of Mr David Jones is a joy for ever, I cannot read the Anathemata. Mindful however of the magical beauty of those pictures, I am ready to spring to attention as soon as Mr Jones starts discoursing in prose; and so, for the purpose of commenting on this collection of his occasional papers and essays, the trouble I have with his other, ‘creative’ writings does not perhaps matter. It is partly no doubt a question of the sort of poetry one is predisposed to admire; and in my own case a mainly ‘Mediterranean’ training, and in particular the example of Dante, make a certain degree of visible order and outline in large-scale poetry a necessity for me. But our present business is with this rich miscellany of reflective prose, and here I find no difficulty at all in taking Mr Jones as a sort of Virgil-guide, a dolce maestro—in this case a Christian one—through a world he knows so well, the obscure but enchanting regions explored in this book.

I must, however, qualify the above with respect to the Welsh and Early British (if that is the right expression) matter contained here (Sections I and III), for on all this I am too ignorant to be even a good pupil. The strings of Welsh names mean nothing to me.