Thomas Henry "Harri" Jones (1921–29 January 1965) was a Welsh poet and university lecturer.

Jones was born in Llanafan-Fawr, Brecknockshire (Powys). He served in the Royal Navy from 1941–1946 during World War II. He attended University of Wales, Aberystwyth, graduating in English in 1947 and gaining a Master of Arts in 1949. He taught in Portsmouth, Hampshire, England from 1951–1959. In 1959 he accepted an appointment as a lecturer (senior lecturer from 1962) in English at University of Newcastle in Newcastle, New South Wales, and so emigrated to Australia. He drowned accidentally at Newcastle in January 1965. He was survived by his wife, Madeline Scott, and three daughters.

Jones wrote poetry in English rather than Welsh. Although his father spoke Welsh, Harri and his siblings adopted their mother’s language, English. He published three volumes of poetry: The Enemy in the Heart (1957), Songs of a Mad Prince (1960) and The Beast at the Door (1963). The Colour of Cockcrowing (1966) and The Collected Poems of T. Harri Jones (1977) were published posthumously.

JONES, THOMAS HENRY (1921-1965)
(1921 – 65)

Poet, born at Cwm Crogau, near Llanafan Fawr, Brecs. His studies in the English Department at the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth, were interrupted by war service with the Royal Navy, but he returned to complete them in 1947 and, two years later, received his Master’s degree. Having obtained a teaching post at the Portsmouth Naval Dockyard Apprentices’ School, be became active as a lecturer with the Workers’ Educational Association.

From early childhood Harri Jones had written poetry and, during the war years, had begun contributing to literary journals, including The Welsh Review and The Dublin Magazine. His first volume, The Enemy in the Heart (1957), containing poems written over the previous decade, showed promise of a new, turbulent talent exploiting the resources of language to explore the tensions between human passions and an atavistic Puritanism. In 1959, despairing of a university post in Wales or England, he became a Lecturer in English at the University of New South Wales and quickly established contacts with writers and editors there, although for his second volume of poems, Songs of a Mad Prince (1960), he drew substantially on poems written before his arrival in Australia. Active and successful in literary and academic circles, with many friends and admirers, he was nevertheless prone to depression and given to heavy drinking. Increasingly, he used poetry as a vehicle for the expression of his personal and emotional problems, discovering in the process a distinctive voice free of the conflicting influences of Dylan Thomas and R. S. Thomas which, along with a predilection for metaphysical conceits, had marked much of his earlier writing.

His next volume, The Beast at the Door (1963), with its expatriate’s evocation of Wales, its incisive portraits and its love poetry combining dramatic complexity and colloquial ease, is perhaps his most accomplished. The confessional mode of his later writing, and an experiment in the form of a long dramatic monologue, pointed the direction of possible future development which was not to be fulfilled: Harri Jones was found drowned in an old rock bathing-pool near his home. His ashes were returned to Wales and buried in the churchyard of Llanfihangel Brynpabuan, not far from the mouth of Cwm Crogau. A posthumous volume of T. H Jones’s poetry, The Colour of Cockcrowing, was published in 1966 and his Collected Poems (ed. Julian Croft and Don Dale-Jones) appeared in 1977.

(Information taken from Meic Stephens’ New Companion to the Literature of Wales, University of Wales Press, 1998)

Suspending his studies, in 1941 Jones joined the Royal Navy. He served in the Mediterranean and experienced the horrors of the Malta convoys—which he recorded in later poems—before being demobilized in 1946 as a leading wireless telegraphist.. His poetry first appeared in the Welsh Review in 1946. Over the next ten years he was remarkably productive. (Sir) Rupert Hart-Davis unhesitatingly published The Enemy in the Heart (London, 1957) and the three volumes which followed: Songs of a Mad Prince (1960), The Beast at the Door (1963) and, after Jones's death, The Colour of Cockcrowing (1966).

Jones's early poetry was highly formal and mannered. His writings later assumed a more muscular and individual voice, though the rhetorical cadences of Milton and the Bible can still be heard. Much of his work was concerned with the temptations of sensuality and with the puritan traditions of the Nonconformist Welsh churches. Australia became the hedonist antithesis of the Spartan theology and life of Wales. At the time of his death, his work had developed an authority and fluency which enhanced his reputation in Wales as one of the best Anglo-Welsh poets of the 1950s and 1960s. His Australian poems are fine records of the postwar immigration experience and have often been included in anthologies. The Collected Poems of T. Harri Jones (Llandysul, Wales, 1977) depicts a form of his name he never used.