The early Middle Ages provided twentieth-century poets with the material
to re-imagine and rework local, religious, and national identities in
their writing. Poet of the Medieval Modern focuses on a key figure
within this tradition, the Anglo-Welsh poet and artist David Jones
(1895-1974):
representing the first extended study of the influence of early medieval
English culture and history on Jones and his novel-length late modernist
poem The Anathemata (1952). Jones's second major poetic project after
In Parenthesis (1937), The Anathemata fuses Jones's visual and
verbal arts to write
a Catholic history of Britain as told through the history of
man-as-artist.
Drawing on unpublished archival material including manuscripts,
sketches, correspondence, and, most significantly, the marginalia from
David Jones's Library, this volume reads with Jones in order to trouble
the distinction between poetry and scholarship. Placing this
underappreciated figure firmly
at the centre of new developments in Modernist and Medieval Studies,
Poet of the Medieval Modern brings the two fields into dialogue and
argues that Jones uses the textual and material culture of the early
Middle Ages--including Old English prose and poetry, Anglo-Latin
hagiography, early medieval
stone sculpture, manuscripts, and historiography--to re-envision British
Catholic identity in the twentieth-century long poem. Jones returned to
the English record to seek out those moments where the histories of the
Welsh had been elided or erased. At a time when the Middle Ages are
increasingly
weaponised in far-right and nationalist political discourse, the book
offers a timely discussion of how the early medieval past has been
resourced to both shore-up and challenge English hegemonies across
modern British culture.
