The Shape of Meaning in the Poetry of David Jones by Thomas Dilworth

Abstract

critic’s opinion that Spenser was not “lily-livered.” Coggins argues and doc­ uments in Spenser an obsession with sexuality that suggests a Lawrentian sex-in-the-head. This work is useful in alerting the reader to the possi­ ble presence of a sexual allusiveness that is bluntly and energetically preVictorian . It will provide, for instance, source-material to assess alongside analyses of Renaissance sexuality such as Jos. Pequigney’s recent provoca­ tive reading of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Certainly, it is hard to imagine any one suspecting a bawdy or salacious or serious sexual allusion in Spenser’s work that has not been mercilessly rounded up by Professor Coggins’s priapic computer. d e r e k n .c . w o o d / St. Francis X a vier U niversity Thomas Dilworth, The Shape of Meaning in the Poetry of David Jones (Toronto: U of Toronto Press, 1988). xii, 434. $47.50 More than fifty years after the artist David Jones’s first appearance in the medium of print (In Parenthesis, 1937), it remains the case that most writ­ ing on his work is both introductory and advocatory. David Jones is, if I may be permitted the crudity, a “hard sell” ; and despite the prolifera­ tion of essays and reviews in literary journals, of doctoral theses, conference proceedings, and scholarly books published by academic presses, Jones is not yet a familiar name in the household of scholarship. Professor Thomas Dilworth notes, for example, that Jones is not included in Philip Larkin’s Oxford Anthology of English Verse; he is seen to have been omitted as part of a “widespread reaction against modernism” (367) despite the critical accolades his work has received from such celebrated poets as T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, W.B. Yeats, Basil Bunting, and Hugh MacDiarmid, whose approbatory words Dilworth invokes in the early pages of his study. Jones has, of course, been anthologized elsewhere over recent years, though his work does not lend itself easily to that mode of propagation nor fit happily within it. For instance, Jones appears in the second edition of The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry (1988), wherein he is represented by selections from In Parenthesis and The Anathemata (1952); from the latter, 115 lines from Part III, “Angle-Land,” are outnumbered if not overwhelmed by some 300 lines of editorial annotation and notes (some of them Jones’s). Therein lies part of the problem for the critical advocate: Jones’s work as example extraordinaire of the modernist-mythic enterprise largely associated with Eliot, Pound, and James Joyce. Nonetheless, the scholarly attention to Jones continues unabated, and 1989 saw another collection of scholarly es­ 241 says and a massive addition to the National Poetry Foundation’s “Man and Poet” series showcasing David Jones. Dilworth himself is preparing a com­ missioned biography for publication some four or five years hence. (Canada, surprisingly some might say, has long been the most hospitable ground for Jones studies; the University of Toronto has been its centre, but books on Jones have issued from the Maritimes to Victoria and many points between.) To hand we have Dilworth’s exhaustively researched, impressively formu­ lated, and densely detailed The Shape of Meaning in the Poetry of David Jones, whose declared purpose is “interpretation . . . a prologue to critical assessment of the poetry [(ix)].” There has, of course, been interpretation before, also attempts at critical assessment, some premature, inept, and ill-informed, some thoughtful and instructive. Much has issued from rather uncritical channels, written by those whose shared backgrounds in things Welsh and/or Roman Catholic might be said to predispose the authors to a certain kind of advocacy. Jones has been well-served, too, by those who were his life-long friends and who have undertaken to present and elucidate his work from that connection and vantage-point. It is a criticism broached by Elizabeth Ward in David Jones Mythmaker, in which she complains that too much writing on Jones has been produced by those who “see things through David Jones’s eyes.” Ward comes in for a fair share of criticism in Dilworth’s book (as he states in his Preface, “interpretation always implies evaluation, and I shall...