The poet and artist David Jones (1895-1974) was born in Brockley, and lived there on and off with his parents for a large part of his life. While not currently within the borders of Kent, Brockley belongs to the historic entity Kent. For that reason, Jones is included in this collection. He was a poet greatly admired by T S Eliot, who regarded him as a genius, and W H Auden, who thought his long work, `The Anathemata’ the single greatest long poem in English of the twentieth century. The intrinsic difficulty of his work, however – the density of reference, both to different languages, literatures and time periods – means that while extremely rewarding and powerful for those that persist, it is not readily accessible. Perhaps the best way to engage with his poetic work is to read it aloud. This was Jones’s own recommendation, and certainly unlocks a lot of the power of tone and music, even when he is using languages from Latin to Welsh, neither of which he was fluent in, but both of which he deployed in his texts to capture something of the complexity of the historic memory traces and their impact on the current British landscape and sense of identity.
Jones persuaded his parents at the age of 14 to allow him to attend Camberwell Art School, and his early life was mostly spent concentrating on drawing, sketching and painting. He was to fall under the influence of the important Catholic artists Eric Gill, something assisted by Jones’s own conversion to Catholicism in 1921. The other great influence over this period was his service as a member of the Royal Welsh Fusiliers (his father, James Jones, had originally hailed from Wales, though his mother Alice was from London). He fought at the front in France from 1915 to 1918. The War was to leave an indelible mark on Jones, being the main suspected cause of his breakdown in 1932 just as he was finishing his long first poem, `In Parenthesis’ which dealt with the experience of the war. His health problems delayed the publication of this work till 1937. He suffered another breakdown 15 years later, but on his recovery from this he issued `The Anathemata’ in 1952. His final years were spent in Harrow, with him suffering from poor health in his final decade.
Jones’s work is so rich in illusion and so multi-layered that it is hard to do it justice beyond commending that it be read. His interest in the creation of myths, and of how eras in history in Britain working from the Roman period down through succeeding ones creates modern identity lends itself to many of the key themes of this study of Kentish writers – the ways in which things may be repressed, but they are not forgotten, and how events from the long past can still figure in the present, shaping and framing it. Jones ask searching questions about the making of the sense of identity in Britain, and the various very different influences and elements that went into it. The complex design of the `Anathemata’ in particular, with its start with a rendition of the celebration of the eucharist, and its exploration of the themes of travel and sea, and shift in historic time frames over the nine sections only become apparent as one works through the various initially seemingly disjointed parts of the work. As a war poet, Jones’s work has gained more interest in recent years. He is a major figure, and one that deserves to be celebrated and studied. For something more accessible, his shorter poem `The Sleeping Lord’ from the 1960s, though published in 1974, is an excellent introduction. That too deals with long processes of change and evolution in the physical landscape, and the ways in which they connect to deep beliefs over origin and meaning and the divine.