David Jones was born in the district of Brockley, on the southeast side of London (his mother's native place) in 1895. His father was a Welsh emigré to London, where he worked as a printer. Jones received little formal education aside from art school (at the Camberwell School of Art, 1909-14, and later the Westminster School of Art, 1919-21), but was extremely receptive from a young age and by his teens was familiar with Welsh mythology, as well as Latin and Old English poetry.
Eager to serve at the outbreak of the First World War, he was nonetheless rejected from two regiments before enlisting in the Royal Welch Fusiliers, with whom he fought from 1915-19 as a private and mostly in the trenches. The Great War crucially shaped his imagination and inspired his first poetic work, In Parenthesis, published in 1937, and hailed by T.S. Eliot as 'a work of genius.' He received similar approbation throughout his career from W.B. Yeats, W.H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Hugh McDiarmid, Kathleen Raine, R.S. Thomas, Evelyn Waugh, Seamus Heaney, Igor Stravinsky and many others.
David Jones: Engraver, Soldier, Painter, Poet By Thomas Dilworth (2017)
As a poet, visual artist and essayist, David Jones is one of the great Modernists. The variety of his gifts reminds us of Blake – though he is a better poet and a greater all-round artist. Jones was an extraordinary engraver, painter and creator of painted inscriptions, but he also belongs in the first rank of twentieth-century poets.
This title is also available from the Collinson Library "Destiny Discover" catalogue.
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