At the turn of a civilization

The British poet and artist David Jones (1895-1974), much praised in his lifetime by such important contemporaries as T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden, is only now beginning to receive the attention that his challenging and carefully wrought work deserves. Jones saw his own era as "the turn of a civilization": a pivotal moment in Western history when a once unified and humane culture, rooted in nature and ritual, was in the midst of corruption, losing its sacred center.

He was perhaps best known in his lifetime for his long poem In Parenthesis (1937), which draws on the poet's experience in the trenches of the First World War. Jones's later work is an ongoing exploration of his fascination with the mythic and religious themes already evident in this early poem. His last volume, The Sleeping Lord and Other Fragments (1974), affirms the enduring value of native cultural traditions against the dehumanizing tendencies of imperialism.

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At the turn of a civilization examines Jones in the context of modernism, comparing his vision of history as an "order of signs" to T. S. Eliot's nostalgia for "tradition" and Ezra Pound's call for a "new paideuma." Jones believed that in the act of making art that embodies and "re-calls" the past, the poet affirms, even creates, an abiding continuity with what is deepest and most valuable in human experience - even in a world overrun by industrialism and imperialism.

This "sacramentalist" view of poetry informs Jones's use of myth and history, his use of "masculine" and "feminine" imagery, and his anti-imperialist vision.

Kathleen Henderson Staudt places the poet in the context of both modern and postmodern poetry, presenting him not as a nostalgic traditionalist but as a profoundly innovative artist. Jones's view of poetry as a sacramental activity is shown to speak provocatively to structuralist and poststructuralist definitions of poetic language.

Analogies are suggested between Jones's emphasis on poetic creation as an act and postmodernist thinking about open form, and his major works are considered in relation to the poetics of the modern long poem. The book also explores the meanings of "masculine" and "feminine" figures in Jones, with particular attention to the remarkable female speakers in "The Anathemata."