David Jones's The Grail Mass and Other Works

Drawing on new archival discoveries, this book presents an authoritative reconstruction of David Jones’s The Grail Mass, the unfinished and unpublished project from which came both his masterpiece The Anathemata – a work described by W.H. Auden as ‘one of the most important poems of our times’ – and The Sleeping Lord and other fragments, his final collection. With detailed commentary on the development and reconstruction of the text, this edition provides a full picture of Jones’s literary endeavours over the second half of his life and further establishes his status as a major figure in the first wave of British modernist writers alongside T.S. Eliot and James Joyce.

Author Biography

David Jones (1895-1974) was a painter and poet increasingly recognized as one of the most important and original voices in British modernism. His poem In Parenthesis was described by T. S. Eliot as “a work of genius” and by Stephen Spender as “the most monumental work of poetic genius to come out of World War I” and his many admirers included W. H. Auden, Herbert Read, and W. B. Yeats. Thomas Goldpaugh, Professor Emeritus, has written extensively on the David Jones Papers at the National Library of Wales and taught for thirty years at Marist College, Poughkeepsie, New York. Jamie Callison is Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of Agder, Norway. He has published widely on modernism and religious culture, T.S. Eliot, and David Jones in journals such as ‘Literature and Theology’, ‘Modernist Cultures’, and ‘ELH’. He is the co-editor of a collection of essays on David Jones’s work entitled: ‘David Jones: A Christian Modernist? New Approaches to his Art, Poetry, and Cultural Theory’ (2017).