David Jones (1895–1974) was a remarkable figure: artist and poet, he was a great original in both disciplines. His was an art of ‘gathering things in’ that engaged imaginatively with history and myth, with his Welsh heritage and the Christian religion. But art also comes out of conflict, and the tension between the two sides of Jones’s creative nature was the motive force that powered so much, both visual and written.
Thus it can be misleading to separate his writing from his painting, for they form and express a single vision. However, Jones is presently most celebrated for his writing, particularly his first world war epic poem, In Parenthesis. Before that was published, in 1937, he was known as a painter and engraver, described by Kenneth Clark as ‘in many ways the most gifted of all the younger English painters’. After In Parenthesis was hailed by T.S. Eliot as ‘a work of genius’, and by W.H.
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