This text vividly presents life on the front line, challenging the accepted wisdom about David Jones's service and illuminating the man and his work. Accompanying the text are photos of Jones and wartime sketches and writing, for the best part previously unpublished, and 7 fully rendered drawings not seen since the war.

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The first full biography of a neglected genius and one of the great Modernists, lavishly illustrated in colour throughout ‘I would like to have done anything as good as David Jones has done’ Dylan Thomas As a poet, visual artist and essayist, David Jones is one of the great Modernists. The variety of his gifts reminds us of Blake – though he is a better poet and a greater all-round artist. Jones was an extraordinary engraver, painter and creator of painted inscriptions, but he also belongs in the first rank of twentieth-century poets. Though he was admired by some of the finest cultural figures of the twentieth century, David Jones is not known or celebrated in the way that Eliot, Beckett or Joyce have been. His work was occasionally as difficult as theirs, but it is just as rewarding – and more various. He is overlooked because his best writing is imbedded in two book-length prose-poems – In Parenthesis and The Anathemata, making it difficult to anthologise; the work is informed by his Catholic faith and so may feel unfashionable in this secular age; he was a shy, reclusive man, psychologically damaged by his time in the trenches, and loathed any kind of self-promotion. Mostly, though, he was a complete and original poet-artist – sui generis, impossible to pigeon-hole – and that has led to the neglect of David Jones: a true genius and the great lost Modernist.

This interdisciplinary and archival study explores the reception of ancient Rome in the artistic, literary, and philosophical works of David Jones (1895-1974)—the Anglo-Welsh, Roman Catholic, First World War veteran. For Jones, the twentieth century was a period of crisis, an age of conflict, disillusionment and cultural decay, all of which he saw as evidence of the decline of Western civilisation. Across his lifetime, Jones would create a dynamic vision of ancient Rome in an attempt both to understand and to challenge this situation. His reimagining of Rome was not founded on a classical education. Instead, it was fashioned from his lived experience, extensive reading, and—most importantly—his engagement with four areas of contemporary discourse that were themselves built upon intricate and conflicting representations of Rome: British political rhetoric, cyclical history, the Catholic cultural revival, and the Welsh nationalist movement. Tracing Jones's developing approach to Rome across these contexts can provide a way into his art and thought. Whether in his poetic fragments, watercolours, essays, letters, marginalia or unique painted inscriptions, Jones strove to question, complicate and remake Rome's relationship with modernity. In this way, Rome appears in Jones's works both as a symbol of transhistorical imperialism, totalitarianism, and the mechanisation of life, and simultaneously as the cultural and religious progenitor of the West, and in particular, of Wales, with which artists must creatively reconnect if decline was to be avoided.

David Jones – author of In Parenthesis, the great poem of World War I – is increasingly recognized as a major voice in the first generation of British modernist writers. Acclaimed by the likes of T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats, and W.H. Auden, his writing was deeply informed by his Catholic faith and Welsh blood. This book makes available for the first time a number of previously unpublished statements by Jones that open new perspectives on his own work and the religious, political, and cultural engagements of British modernism more broadly. Annotated throughout, with detailed commentaries exploring the historical context of each document, the volume presents the restored text of Jones's essay on Hitler and includes a letter to Neville Chamberlain, an unfinished essay on Gerard Manley Hopkins, and the transcript of an interview with Jones a year before his death. These reveal an unknown side of Jones and give fresh insight into the influences and assumptions of 20th-century British literary culture.

The First World War produced an extraordinary flowering of poetic talent, poets whose words commemorate the conflict more personally and as enduringly as monuments in stone. Lines such as 'What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?' and 'They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old' have come to express the feelings of a nation about the horrors and aftermath of war. This new anthology provides a definitive record of the achievements of the Great War poets. As well as offering generous selections from the celebrated soldier-poets, including Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Rupert Brooke, and Ivor Gurney, it also incorporates less well-known writing by civilian and women poets. Music hall and trench songs provide a further lyrical perspective on the War. A general introduction charts the history of the war poets' reception and challenges prevailing myths about the war poets' progress from idealism to bitterness. The work of each poet is prefaced with a biographical account that sets the poems in their historical context. Although the War has now passed out of living memory, its haunting of our language and culture has not been exorcised. Its poetry survives because it continues to speak to and about us.

David Jones's 'Anathemata' is a spiritual and historical poem which looks at the West and in particular Britain.