David Jones

Extract

The process by which the enduring reputation of one writer emerges among many of (at the time) apparently equal merit is mysterious. We do not so much change our minds as discover them; no dramatic reversal is involved but a gradual enlightenment makes it clear that (as in the present case) David Jones is such a figure. The supreme quality of his art (using the word in its inclusive sense, for it would be impossible, so closely related is the technique of his drawing to that of his use of words, to say that David Jones is an artist who also writes, or the reverse) has long been apparent to an inner circle of his friends, which included T. S. Eliot; but he has never at any time been a widely read, still less a fashionable writer, nor is he ever likely to become so, for his work is too fine and subtle and learned for popular taste. To ‘discover’ David Jones is to enter an elite.

It was for a time possible for my generation to persuade ourselves that ‘the late Yeats’ was a different and incomparably better poet than ‘the early Yeats’ in order to justify what was really a change in ourselves and not in the poet. In the case of David Jones nothing of the kind would be possible. In the current number of Agenda there are several pieces of recent writing (or recently completed, for David Jones has a habit of laying aside pieces of work for years and then getting them out and working over them) but these are not technically different from, or necessarily better or worse than, In Parenthesis, his poetic novel, or epic poem, of the first World War.