When Stravinsky visited David Jones in his cold Harrow bedsit, he came away saying, ‘I have been in the presence of a holy man.’ Other admirers included T.S. Eliot (his publisher) and the Queen Mother (who wrote asking if she could buy some of his work). Harold Bloom, Kenneth Clark and W.H. Auden were all not merely admirers, but passionate in their admiration. Auden thought Jones’s long Eucharistic poem ‘The Anathemata’ the ‘finest long poem written in English this century’.
Yet Jones remained completely his own man, belonging to no ‘set’. He had very little money and has never, as far as one can tell, been part of the Eng. lit. mainstream. While ‘first world war poets’ on the BBC still seem to be Wilfred Owen and Rupert Brooke, Jones’s In Parenthesis — the greatest war poem in the English language — remains a cult book read by the few.
As a visual artist, likewise, Jones does not have the blowsy splashy fame that has been bestowed on the far less interesting Francis Bacon. Yet the comparisons made, during his lifetime, by many who knew and loved him or his work, between Jones and William Blake, seem entirely apposite. Like Blake, Jones was someone who decidedly followed his own path, even though this entailed a life of poverty and obscurity. His wonderful watercolours and etchings; his haunting arrangements of lettering; his all too few essays on art, literature, anthropology and religion; and his extended poems — meditations on our collective past, mythic, Celtic and Roman — are comparable to Blake’s. He is not derivative of Blake but, like the earlier artist, Jones’s ‘take’ on life and history, completely original, needed the outlet not only of the written word, but of the crafted calligraphic letter and the visual image.
Thomas Dilworth’s biography is the work of a lifetime.
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