The David Jones Society in North America was started at a gathering at the Cathedral College of Washington National Cathedral on St. David's Day, March 1, 2009. We want to be a web presence and source of information and networking for scholars interested in David Jones everywhere, but especially in North America. We hope this will be a vehicle for sharing information and ideas about David Jones's life, art and poetry.
Artist and writer David Jones (1875-1974) is less well known than he should be among his modernist contemporaries, though his work was hailed and promoted by W.H. Auden, T.S.Eliot, and many others. His unusual and compelling visual and poetic work is in many ways ahead of the modernist era in which he worked. Drawing on a variety of cultural and historical contexts, including Welsh legend and myth, Roman history and Catholic Christian theology, his visual art and his poetry develops and explores explore the “sacramental” practice of the artist in a world torn by violence and cultural fragementation. His essay “Art and Sacrament” has been hailed by Rowan Williams as “one of the most important pieces of writing in the twentieth century on art and the sacred.” His major poems, In Parenthesis, The Anathemata, and The Sleeping Lord offer an experience of lyric beauty and epic scope that is rare and compelling. We in the David Jones Society, on both sides of the Atlantic, work to promote interest in Jones's work among both scholars and lovers of art, poetry, and the life of the spirit.
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