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discoveries, this book presents an authoritative reconstruction of David Jones’s The Grail Mass, the unfinished and unpublished project from which came both his masterpiece The Anathemata – a work described by W.H. Auden as ‘one of the most important poems of our times’ – and The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.
In addition to the text of The Grail Mass, this edition includes a number of unpublished fragments by Jones that emerged from this larger project, complete with textual commentaries.
The poet and painter David Jones (1895-1974) was one of the most important and original voices in British modernism. His epic 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.B. Yeats, W.H. Auden and Herbert Read.
Thomas Goldpaugh is Professor Emeritus of English at Marist College, USA.
Jamie Callison is Associate Professor of British and American Literature at Nord University, Norway.