Provincialism and the modern diaspora: T.S. Eliot and David Jones

Matthews, S. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0296-5298 (2009) Provincialism and the modern diaspora: T.S. Eliot and David Jones. English, 58 (220). pp. 57-72. ISSN 1756-1124 doi: 10.1093/english/efn038

Abstract/Summary

This article considers how T. S. Eliot's promotion of the work of the Anglo-Welsh poet David Jones after the Second World War further involved him in a process of considering the resonances of the local and familiar as operative within the displacements of modernity. This promotion therefore retrospectively prioritized an aspect of Eliot's poetics which had been present, but occluded, all along. Conversely, the article considers how similar resonances in Jones's own work were enhanced by his encounter with Eliot's translation of the Francophone Caribbean poet St-John Perse's Anabase, an encounter which enabled Jones to establish an idiom responsive to the divergent cultural affinities inherent in ‘our situation’.