The Achievement of David Jones
Papers from the Convention of the Modern Language Association, 29 December 1981
On December 19, 1981, just about one week before the convention of the Modern Language Association in New York City, John B. Breslin, the associate director of the Georgetown University Press, published an article in America magazine called 'David Jones: A Christian Poet for a Secular Age'. America is not a literary magazine, and Father Breslin's article is an introduction for the general reader to an important but regrettably little-known writer. 'If asked,' it begins, 'to name the major poets of the 20th century or, more specifically, the major religious poets, few would instinctively mention the Anglo-Welshman David Jones.'
The same doubt would be true among critics and teachers of literature in the United States and Canada. Jones does, of course, have his admirers (one thinks, for example, of William Blissett and John Matthias), but they are relatively few, and even with the ever increasing attention his work has received in the years since his death, it remains largely unread in colleges and universities on this side of the world. The publication by Faber and Faber of Introducing David Jones, edited by John Matthias, will, one hopes, help correct the situation, for it makes a coherent and well-chosen selection of his writing readily available to students and their teachers.
The papers collected here grow out of a special session at the MLA Convention called The Achievement of David Jones. The purpose of the session, as we told the programme committee, was to introduce David Jones to teachers of literature by surveying his career, examining the relationship of the man and his work, and gauging his achievement as a writer. But we felt the session was an apostolic undertaking as well, for we wanted to share our enthusiasm for the work of David Jones and bring others to read and enjoy it themselves. (Like the ancient mariner, whose poem touches so much of Jones's writing, we had a tale to teach.) Thomas Dilworth discussed the connection between events on the Western front and In Parenthesis. In reply to Paul Fussell, Joseph Cohen argued that In Parenthesis is 'structured coherently by virtue of its adherence to the principles by which we now understand the universe to operate'. Carson Daly set forth some of the reasons for calling The Anathemata 'a great modernist poem'. Leo M. J. Manglaviti suggested the relationship of the life, heritage, and faith of David Jones to The Anathemata. Teresa Godwin Phelps traced the impact of Jones's Welsh heritage on two of his last poems, 'The Hunt' and 'The Sleeping Lord'. Their papers are necessarily brief and suggestive rather than analytic and closely argued, for the schedule at the convention dictated they be no longer than ten or twelve minutes each. But they do, I think, despite their brevity, suggest the curve of Jones's career, offer useful discussions of his work, and celebrate his indisputably remarkable achievement. As we did in New York, we offer them here as tributes to David Jones - 'bright boughs of various flowering', worthy, we hope, of his precedence.
MICHAEL COLLINS
(Lecturer in English, Georgetown University, Washington, D.C.)
Page(s) 35-36
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