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THE GREAT WAR
AND MODERNIST
POETRY
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‘I think the day by day in the Waste Land, the sudden violences and long stillnesses,
the sharp contours and unformed voids of that mysterious existence, profoundly
affected the imaginations of those who suffered it. It was a place of enchantment. It is
perhaps best described in Malory, book iv, chapter 15—that landscape spoke ‘‘with
a grimly voice’’.’^1 So David Jones invokes the landscape he witnessed on the Western
Front, where he served as an infantryman in the Royal Welch Fusiliers from 1915 to
- Here, in the preface to his book-length poemIn Parenthesis(1937), he turns
the terrain of his combat experience into a rich crypt of literary history. Inscribing
a bibliography of his own affective memory, his record comprises, but exceeds, the
reference to that landmark work of poetic modernism, Eliot’sThe Waste Land.If
the moods of disillusion in that poem are attributed usually to the conditions of
post-war ennui, Jones’s citation reaches further back to establish his imaginative
companionship in representing the event. Thewhole tradition of urban modernity
in verse—stemming from the proto-modernism of mid-nineteenth-century French
poetry, extending from Baudelaire and Gautier through Wilde and other 1890s
poets to Eliot—is brought into the present tense of Jones’s own service in war-torn
(^1) David Jones, ‘Preface’, inIn Parenthesis(London: Faber, 1963; 1st pub. 1937), pp. x–xi;. hereafter
abbreviated in the text asIP. The introductory note by Eliot to the 1963 edition, recalling his own
major part in soliciting the work for publication by Faber in 1937, supplies context and literary history
for the continuities he perceives between his own work and Jones’s.