Jones, David

David Jones (1895-1974)

was born in Kent to an English mother and Welsh father. He is equally renowned as a poet and an artist. His first poem was In Parenthesis (1937), an epic based on his experience in the first world war trenches. He then wrote The Anathemata (1952), a symbolic anatomy of western culture, which W.H. Auden regarded as the best long poem in English of the twentieth century. After its publication T.S. Eliot – who had called In Parenthesis ‘a work of genius’ – included Jones in the exclusive company of great literary modernists consisting of himself, Pound and Joyce.