ELH

ELH 68.1 (2001) 179-213

Notes on the Outside: David Jones, "Unshared Backgrounds," and (the Absence of) Canonicity

Elizabeth F. Judge

Here to her chosen all her works she shows;
Prose swelled to verse, verse loitering into prose.

--Alexander Pope, The Dunciad, 1.273-74.

I.

The requisite preface to writing on David Jones is to lament that he is "known but not assimilated" before invoking a parade of canonicals to testify on his behalf. ¹ This technique is used to proclaim his right to canonization and to rant about his academic neglect, but one reason for his exclusion from the canon--the seemingly trivial feature of his penchant for auto-annotation of his verse--has itself not been assimilated by his admirers nor carefully examined by his critics. ² Recognizing that canon construction is a dynamic and complex process with many variables that cannot be definitively identified retroactively or prospectively, I am not asserting a categorical claim that authorial annotation is the only factor in Jones's noncanonical status, but I believe it to be the most important and the most overlooked. Nor do I insist that his current non-canonical status is permanent; for example, genre critics interested in the play between annotation and poem could kindle critical interest in Jones. This essay examines the specific case of a poet whose chronology, ideology, and method, exclusive of his footnotes, coincide with the modernist agenda, and who was devotedly promoted by principals in the modernism movement, but who has nevertheless not been valorized by inclusion in the Modernist canon. I deliberately construe membership in the canon narrowly in order to examine Jones's canonicity by the gauge that his supporters (who judged him to be an artist equal to Eliot, Joyce, and Pound) and Jones himself (his epic length poems in scope and ambition rival the Cantos, The Waste Land, and Finnegans Wake) constructed and to analyze why this mismatch between the predictions of his influential advocates and his current non-canonical status has occurred. The essay argues that the poet's practice of self-annotation and the kind of commentary he makes has precluded his entrance into the canon, and that evidence of this can be found by [End Page 179] comparing Jones to the entrenched canonicity of T. S. Eliot and his The Waste Land's annotational invitations to critical exegesis. The argument hinges on the specific relationship between modernism's tenets and academic discourse, and how that interaction influenced the professionalization of the canon. ³

Jones, the Anglo-Welsh twentieth-century poet (1895-1974), is part of that small circle, including William Morris, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Wyndham Lewis, who achieved a high level of proficiency in both poetry and art; in addition to his poetry, Jones was a master watercolorist, calligrapher, and engraver (creating wood engravings for an edition of Gulliver's Travels and copper engravings for The Rime of the Ancient Mariner). His first published poetic work, which appeared long after he established a reputation as a graphic artist, was In Parenthesis, a long poem on the First World War but written outside the period of the "war-poets": it was begun in 1928, completed in 1932 except for titling and preface, and published, under T. S. Eliot's sponsorship, in 1937. ⁴ In Parenthesis won the prestigious British Hawthornden Prize for poetry that year, and it was hailed by prominent modernists. Yeats "salute[d]" its author. ⁵ Eliot, in his 1961 "A Note of Introduction" to the republication, proclaimed it a "work of genius" which "deeply moved" him. ⁶ Auden called it "the greatest book about the First World War" that he had read and later dubbed it a "masterpiece." ⁷ Kathleen Raine found it "one of the works of enduring value that emerged from the first world war." ⁸ In Parenthesis, according to Robert Speaight, is "among the rare incontestable masterpieces of the twentieth century." ⁹

A similar poetic embrace was extended by important players to Jones's second long poem, The Anathemata. More intricately allusive and less...