ABSTRACT
In the gloomy roll-call of poets who died in 1985, the oldest was Robert Graves, aged ninety. Many of Graves's later poems are stylish, subdued, deeply romantic in feeling but classically laconic in expression, with a courtliness of address which became his characteristic tone. A much more enigmatic member of this pre-1900 generation, those who were already adults at the time of the First World War, was David Jones, poet, painter and graphic artist, whose literary work and personality were as individual as those of Graves but who has attracted a cult-following rather than general affection and admiration. There are many contrasts in David Jones's poetry, between innocence and experience, between archaism and modernism, between a tenuous romantic mysticism and a hard precision of language. Jones seems to have attempted an historical Christian counterpart to what Ezra Pound tailed to achieve, in my opinion, in the Cantos, a view of the flood.
