[There] is no other modern English poet who raises such enthralling technical problems, or who (besides Eliot) seems to offer so deep an insight into what poetry is and can do [as David Jones]…. He is a unique, perhaps a difficult and certainly an original poet; the reward of his work is a gradual understanding of it which cannot be communicated. (pp. 80-1)

The special flavour of his poetry has continually become more intense, but it was already unmistakable in his long poem about the 1914 war. Since then his subject matter has ostensibly widened, he has become obsessed with the past, with prehistory, with human tradition and with local numina; the 1914 war, the Roman empire and mediaeval Wales have each of them furnished the raw material of his poetry; these themes have been important to him because they are the most present to his understanding of history and...