Friday 29 January 2010

Jones the Word


Of all his prodigious artistic and literary output, the painted inscriptions of David Jones (1895-1974) remain my most favourite. One of the most significant first-generation of British modernist poets, his work was informed by his Welsh heritage and by his Catholicism. T.S. Eliot considered Jones to be a poet of major importance, and Anathemata (1952) was said by W.H. Auden to be the most important poem to have been written in English in the 20th century.