David Jones on Religion, Politics, and Culture

Bloomsbury Academic includes four unpublished David Jones texts in this new volume in its "Modernist Archives" series ... They are useful, and often valuable, additions to the now extensive oeuvre, each scrupulously (but extensively) edited. * The Tablet *
David Jones (1895–1974) is acknowledged increasingly as a pioneering poet and visual artist … This addition to the Jones corpus confirms those judgments while opening new lines of scholarly inquiry, particularly concerning his stances on crucial, and controversial, political issues of his era … Kathleen Henderson Staudt provides a capacious, judicious historiographical survey that orients tyros to this burgeoning field while enriching veteran scholars’ interpretations. Staudt’s distilled edition of the Hopkins essay presents Jones’s reflections on the Victorian poet-priest as a proleptic modernist and on the resultant “mystery” of profound affinities existing between artists separated by decades, even centuries. Thomas Berenato’s exhaustive manuscript study of this article further includes cogent encapsulations of core aspects of Jones’s worldview, especially his theology and aesthetics, many of which are reiterated in the 1973 interview and which informed his political outlook. * The University Bookman *