Publisher's Synopsis
The writer and artist David Jones is famous for being ignored, so much so that many investigations of his work have concentrated on the more tractable question of why he is ignored than of whether he should be. Furthermore, the most ambitious attempt to date to promote Jones's work, namely by the critic Thomas Dilworth, bases its positive evaluation on the detection of a characteristic `spatial structure' which, if it is present in Jones's individual works at all, is neither obvious nor obviously praiseworthy, rendering the attempt a classic case of explaining the obscure by the more obscure. A more promising effort would base the appraisal of Jones on a feature which, because inherently relational, becomes more apparent as more of his works are looked at, namely his style. Defining style using the technique of quasi-analysis pioneered by the logician Rudolf Carnap enables it to be seen as not only relational but also as an indicator of that skill which Jones and his mentor Eric Gill saw as the basis of art. It thus provides a much needed counter-balance to the analysis of poetry pioneered by Harold Bloom which sees the success of one work as arising from the cleverness with which it viciously subverts another, a cleverness embodied in a series of revisionary ratios which he sees as relating the subverting and subverted poems. On the opposing view developed herein, the virtue of one work can consist in the reinforcement which it lends to another, a reinforcement embodied in a newly defined ratio of style which is not only a sign of skill but which is also abundantly evident in the work of David Jones.
