Belief in Religion: the Poetry of David Jones

Abstract

David Jones’s modernism has a good deal in common with that of James Joyce: ‘affinity’ is Eliot’s carefully chosen word.¹ Both see the artist in a late culture phase as a kind of Ishmael,² and for both a similar Celtic complexity and intricacy express strikingly individual interpretations of the ‘universum’ of Western European civilisation.³ Both share a Catholic respect for the sacramental: the awesome means by which a material world, properly dedicated, can become the vehicle of grace and illumination. Both draw on a similar kind of recondite erudition, not sparing the reader but drawing on curious etymologies, fragments of languages dead and living, popular sayings, folklore, slang, and curious patternings of dialect to create a sense of how, in an age of specialisation and intensive self-consciousness, even the peculiarities of one man’s store of learning and experience must be fashioned to transmit the riches of his culture’s past. ‘Every word so deep, Leopold,’⁴ says Bloom to himself; the same sense of language recurs everywhere in David Jones, who speaks of Joyce frequently and with admiration.⁵