The Dying Gaul and Other Writings

David Jones

A rich collection of prose, including the final major piece David Jones would write, exploring his deep connection to Wales, reissued in paperback with a cover based on the artist’s original design

2 in stock

£17.99
Format
Paperback
ISBN
9780571339532
Date Published
27.04.2017
Delivery
All orders are sent via Royal Mail and are tracked: choose from standard or premium delivery.
Summary

‘To open a book by David Jones is to walk in the ley lines of his dreaming, a dreaming offered to believer and non-believer alike. Like Blake, John Clare and D H Lawrence, he is one of Albion’s great secret imaginers, his prophetic work radiant with “the splendour of forms yet to come”.’ New Statesman

The Dying Gaul, David Jones’s second collection of prose, was published posthumously in 1978. In these essays, Jones explores his deep connection to Wales through its culture, symbolism and through the notion of heroic defeat. He brings particular focus to the question of visual art, not only in Wales, but also in England and in its relationship to war. The collection concludes with a meditation on Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, the final substantive piece that David Jones would write, and one which would find him at his most reflective and redemptive.

Critic Reviews

Like Thoreau, Melville and Hopkins, [David Jones] was one of literature’s saints who speak with an authority that comes more from religion than from the world of letters.

Stephen Spender
Critic Reviews

The most important native British poet of the twentieth century.

Thomas Dilworth
DavidJones

David Jones (1895-1974) was born in Kent. In 1915, then an art student, he went to war with the Royal Welsh Fusiliers, where he fought in the battles of the Somme and Ypres. In 1922 he began a long association with the artist Eric Gill. In Parenthesis, based on Jones’s experiences in World War I, was published in 1937, followed…

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