I’m accustomed to saying that In Parenthesis by David Jones is the greatest work of modernist poetry you’ve never read. It exists in the same class as The Waste Land and The Cantos, and is arguably second only to the former. Eliot himself considered Jones a writer of “major importance” and the poem “a work of genius.” W. H. Auden likewise regarded it as “a masterpiece” and “the greatest book about the First World War.” Despite this, it suffered decades of critical neglect, perhaps because of its status as a “prose poem,” or perhaps because, until the late 1980s, Faber didn’t officially list Jones among its published poets, leading to its own parenthetical status in the modernist canon. One can go through an entire undergraduate program and never encounter Jones. This would have been the case for me, too, had I not studied under Thomas Dilworth, an eminent Jones scholar, who has described In Parenthesis as “probably the greatest literary work on war in English” and “the only great epic since Paradise Lost.”

Jones is exceptional for many reasons. In addition to being a poet, he was also a gifted draftsman and engraver, for which he is equally celebrated. He was one of the few “native” British modernists (so many of them were originally from Ireland or America). Though of the same generation as Joyce and Eliot, he was the last to arrive. In Parenthesis wasn’t published until 1937, at the tail end of modernism—1939 being a convenient marker for the end of the epoch, with the publication of Finnegans Wake and the start of the Second World War. And, of course, Jones is perhaps most exceptional for having been, in the most complimentary sense, an “amateur,” having never produced a major poetic work before In Parenthesis.

Virtually all of the modernist writers were affected by the Great War, but Jones was one of the few to have actually served in it. He spent 117 weeks in total at the front, participated in the assault on Mametz Wood on the first day of the Battle of the Somme (July 1, 1916), and was shot in the calf. In Parenthesis is a synthesis of his first seven months in the war, beginning with the anabasis before Christmas 1915 and culminating at the Somme the following summer. Passages of the poem began appearing as early as 1928, during a bout of illness that kept Jones from painting. The first draft was completed in the summer of 1932, at which point he suffered the nervous breakdown that dogged him throughout the decade (a “long long weary unwellness”), ultimately delaying publication until 1937. Jones described the period of the poem’s composition as “a kind of space in between”—hence its title.

It was his stated ambition to produce a “totality in a little…space.” He called it a “typic” work: an allusive, intertextual layer cake, wherein myth, legend, romance, religion, and history all map onto one another in a single narrative. It recalls many poetic forms—epic, elegy, lyric, chanson de geste. Shakespeare’s Henry V, Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” and Y Gododdin (a medieval Welsh elegy that provides epigraphs for each section) are among the many texts Jones references. These allusions are loosely associative, in keeping with the “elbow-room for idiosyncrasy that connected one with a less exacting past” that marked his experience early on in the war. Unifying the allusions are the epic tropes of brotherhood, courage, and calamity in great wars throughout history: the poem aligns the Battle of the Somme with Agincourt and Crécy, the fall of Roland at Roncevaux Pass in 778, the defeat of the Gododdin by the Angles at Catraeth in 600, and the Battle of Camlann—the legendary conflict in which Arthur was slain, marking the end of Roman Britain.

Like The Waste Land, In Parenthesis has at its center the story of the Fisher King from Arthurian literature, the maimed monarch whose impotence casts his lands into ruin. The lands can be restored only with the consummation of the grail quest, thus completing the cycle of sacrifice and rebirth. Jones and Eliot were both heavily influenced by Jessie Weston’s From Ritual to Romance (1919), which traces the origin of the legend to fertility rituals of early pagan “vegetation cults.” Jones was somewhat coy about the influence of The Waste Land and the whole mode of what he called “mythological & somewhat obscure ‘allusion-writing,’” which he claimed was “an inevitable trend” in “this groping age.” Nevertheless, Jones’s poem is, like Eliot’s, an “encyclopedic” text, equipped with endnotes and plenty of extracurricular reading to occupy exegetes.

All of this is to say that In Parenthesis is not an “easy” poem to read. The feeling one is likely to have when reading it for the first time is one of intense disorientation. This was my experience when I encountered it at the age of twenty-one, only superficially acquainted with its alleged difficulty. A reader conditioned to think that poetry is something you’re meant to “get” might be demoralized by this, but one can’t possibly expect to take in the whole of the poem’s depth on a first pass. In his introduction to In Parenthesis, Eliot writes that the “thrill of excitement” we feel when encountering a new work is precisely due to our not understanding it. Poetry must first enter into the senses before it can become intelligible. Understanding comes later—if it comes at all.

The bewildering effect of the poem is due in equal measure to its verbal density, its narrative techniques, and its lack of a clear point of view. It is polyphonic, with many voices interjecting and overlapping, forming a kind of chorus. Most of the time it’s hard to tell who is speaking. Jones also uses the second-person pronoun (“You feel exposed and apprehensive in this new world”), especially in the poem’s final section, which conscripts the reader into a field of fluid intersubjectivity. This actually generates its own kind of realism, capturing the collective confusion of men in an environment where no one really knows what’s happening.

In Parenthesis is a poem, yet it is not written in verse. Much of it is what’s called, for the sake of convenience, prose poetry, though this description is insufficient. It is an oral/aural epic, fully experienced only when read aloud. Eliot wrote that Jones, like Joyce, had the “Celtic Ear” for the music of language. Military terminology, commands, coordinates, slang, and song are all part of the poem’s verbal furniture. Lyrical, liturgical, vulgar, technical, it easily assimilates the high and the low, often in the space of a single sentence:

The hide and seek of dark-lit light-dark yet accompanied their going; the journeying moon yet curtained where she went…and over the hill-country that per-bright Shiner stood for Her rod-budding (he kept his eyes toward the swift modulations of the sky, heaven itinerant hurrying with his thought hasting)—but that was a bugger of a time ago.

The poem moves synesthetically from sensory descriptions of environment—mud, rain, rats, chemical flares, barbed-wire fields stinking of corpses and chlorinated lime—into the “interiorly” experienced (“[h]alf-minds, far away, divergent, own-thought thinking”). This, Jones suggests, comes out of “[t]he folk tradition of the insular Celts” which “seems to present to the mind a half-aquatic world” and introduces a “feeling of transparency and interpenetration of one element with another, of transposition and metamorphosis.” It also captures the daydreaming that took place on the front during the lengthy periods of nervous inactivity, the stretches of eventless boredom that alternated with high-intensity terror. One of the most shimmering passages is a description of an artillery strike—“some mean chemist’s contrivance, a stinking physicist’s destroying toy”:

Out of the vortex, rifling the air it came—bright, brass-shod, Pandoran; with all-filling screaming the howling crescendo’s up-piling snapt. The universal world, breath held, one half second, a bludgeoned stillness. Then the pent violence released a consummation of all burstings out; all sudden up-rendings and rivings-through—all taking-out of vents—all barrier-breaking—all unmaking. Pernitric begetting—the dissolving and splitting of solid things…a great many mangolds, uprooted, pulped, congealed with chemical earth, spattered and made slippery the rigid boards leading to the emplacement. The sap of vegetables slobbered the spotless breech-block of No. 3 gun.

It is an exemplary paragraph, in part because it encapsulates the aesthetic irony of the whole poem: How can one write with such sensibility about something that so assaults the senses? How, moreover, can one write pastoral poetry in the wasteland? Jones described no-man’s land as, occasionally, “a place of enchantment”—the last thing we would consider it. Dilworth writes that “[h]e may be the only man on record to have thought no man’s land beautiful,” adding, “but then he was not prone to confusing aesthetics with other categories of evaluation.” Indeed, there’s something of an irrepressible aesthete in Jones: he couldn’t look at the trees swaying in Mametz Wood and not think of Birnam; he even considered taking an unexploded German stick bomb that nearly killed him because of the coloring on the handle—“the sight of it gave me some kind of pleasure,” he later wrote.

If nothing else, this speaks to the persistence of aesthetic pleasure even in an environment so violently hostile to it. We aren’t inclined to see war as an aesthetic experience, and indeed part of our aversion to the First World War is aesthetic. Agreeing with the many people who deemed chemical offensives “unchivalrous,” Jones acknowledged: “It is not easy in considering a trench-mortar barrage to give praise for the action proper to chemicals—full though it may be of beauty.” Jones considered these weapons “sinister in the extreme.” Apparently one can despise chlorine gas but still like its color. Jones never proposed an answer to this “dilemma,” as he described it, but he was “particularly conscious of it” when writing.

Here, an easy conflation of aesthetic and moral judgment might lead one to think, as some of the poem’s more moralistic critics did, that Jones had “romanticized” the war. For his part, Jones considered his poem neither anti- nor pro-war: “I have only tried to make a shape in words,” he wrote in his preface. Some accused him of unfaithful artifice: he couldn’t possibly have experienced the war in this way. Who could? How could a poem about World War I be so lyrically embroidered, so referentially dense, so intellectually and spiritually responsive to objectively abhorrent phenomena? But by all accounts, this really was how Jones experienced the war, and in any case, he wasn’t concerned with an “objective” rendering of it, but rather with how the poetic imagination processes it.

In part, this meant recovering a sense of continuity with the past. Jones reported that in the trenches “a strange metamorphosis seemed to take place in one’s feelings,” which induced “a feeling of reality, gravity, urgency…. [O]ne felt in communion with all the past.” This was more than just a poetic patina: at twelve feet deep, trenches turned up Roman coins and pottery; the assault on Mametz Wood took place about forty-three miles from the battlefields of Agincourt and Crécy; and the soldiers’ tin hats, introduced in 1915, were modeled on medieval kettle helmets. True to the spirit of modernism, In Parenthesis ironizes its allusions by setting them in an environment that seems to rob them of their splendor, revealing a disjunction between the heroic past and an ostensibly unheroic present.

This continuity of historical time, central to modernism—by which the past interpenetrates the present—is key to taking in the poem in its fullness. The war, like modernism itself, represented a rupture in history, in which a reconstitution of the literary and historical imagination was needed for an entirely new field of human experience. Any poetry about the war that failed to do this was somewhat deficient. As John H. Johnston argues in “The Heroic Vision: David Jones” (which Jones himself much admired): “This lack of historical perspective seriously weakened the moral and artistic qualities of the poetry written during the war; any event, no matter how deeply it affects the sensibilities, ceases to be morally or even physically significant when it is isolated from all other events.” In Parenthesis, which succeeds in finding the hidden continuities within obvious dissonances, is quintessentially a work of modernism for this very reason, and one that could only have come out of its own parenthetical epoch.

To claim that industrialized war is unworthy of such representation is to be asleep in history. It is precisely through the historical imagination that a transformation can take place, giving battle back its metaphysics and its spiritual dimension, connecting the experiences of soldiers across ages. Poiesis thus becomes the force by which memories associated with mass slaughter (“a whole unlovely order”) can be lifted above earthly misery and transubstantiated into a true memorial. Like few other war poems, In Parenthesis allows us to see the battlefield as something more than what Wallace Stevens called a “geography of the dead.” Through the education of one soldier’s consciousness, which reaches toward “totality,” the poem—true to its title—reveals the in-betweenness of all things.