The David Jones Journal : Summer 2000
Price Owens, Anne (ed)
Swansea Institute (2000)
In Collection
#6207
0*
Periodical
Periodical 
Product Details
Nationality Welsh
Pub Place Swansea
Volume Volume 2 Number 1
Issue No. 1
Personal Details
Read It Yes
User Defined
Conflict WW1
Notes
From http://davidjonessociety.weebly.com/about.html:
Following the success of several symposia held in 1995 (in Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, Warwick University & Trinity St David’s Lampeter), to celebrate the Centenary of David Jones (1895-1974), the David Jones Society was reinstated in 1996.

The Society aims to promote and encourage knowledge of the painter-poet, David Jones, and his holistic vision of the world. Having trained as a painter, he continued to paint throughout his life, producing such masterpieces as ‘Manawydan’s Glass Door’(1932) and ‘Flora in Calyx-Light’(1950). He also created some powerful wood and metal engravings, notably those for Coleridge’s poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Perhaps his unique contribution to twentieth century visual art was his ‘painted inscriptions’, where word and image combine in harmonious abstract patterns, which he made in his later years.

With the outbreak of the First World War, Jones enlisted with the Royal Welch Fusiliers and served on the Western Front from 1915 to 1918 with the 38th (Welsh) Division. He served longer at the front than any other British war writer. His experiences in the trenches were to prove important in his later painting and poetry, especially his involvement in the fight at Mametz Wood.

Although he had been trying to write about his wartime experiences since 1928, it was not until 1937 that Jones published his first literary effort. In Parenthesis, which was published by Faber and Faber with an introduction (in 1961) by T. S. Eliot, is a mixture of verse and prose-lines but the rich language establishes it as poetry, which is what Jones himself considered it. Jones's literary debut won praise from critics and from fellow-poets such as Eliot and W.B. Yeats, as well as garnering the Hawthornden Prize in the following year. Jones's style can be described as High Modernism; the poem draws on literary influences from the 6th-century Welsh epic Y Gododdin to Thomas Malory's Morte d'Arthur to the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins and Anabase by St. John Perse (translated by Eliot) to try to make sense of the carnage he witnessed in the trenches. An extract from In Parenthesis read by Jones himself in 1967 appears on the audiobook CD Artists Rifles.