Reconsiderations May 2018
The metamorphosis of David Jones
A review of David Jones: Engraver, Soldier, Painter, Poet by Thomas Dilworth.
No twentieth-century poet in the English-speaking world has been more undeservedly neglected than David Jones. T. S. Eliot called him “one of the most distinguished writers of my generation.” Dylan Thomas declared, “I would like to have done anything as good as David Jones has done.” Hugh MacDiarmid called Jones “the greatest native British poet of the century.” Igor Stravinsky considered him “a writer of genius.” He is “one of the greatest twentieth-century poets in English,” said W. S. Merwin. And these men spoke to only a part of Jones’s portfolio. A visual artist and a poet in equal measure, Jones was “in the first rank of modern artists,” according to his friend and mentor Eric Gill, for his engravings, drawings, paintings (mostly watercolors), and inscriptions—the last almost unique in the history of twentieth-century visual...
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