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 art. For this range of achievement, encompassing both the literary and the fine arts, the most serviceable comparison is William Blake—and Jones’s philosophical penetration was considerably greater than Blake’s.

Nonetheless, Jones remains almost exclusively a footnote in accounts of better-known lives, when he appears at all.

Thomas Dilworth has striven heroically to change that. A literature professor at Ontario’s University of Windsor, Dilworth has devoted his career to Jones, publishing several book-length studies and bringing into print Jones’s never-collected poetry and essays, and some of his correspondence. Dilworth has now, finally, published a full-length biography of Jones, the product of several decades of research and a work unlikely ever to be surpassed