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The Anathemata: Fragments of an Attempted Writing
'The Anathemata can scarcely fail to be counted a great book... It does what Epic is meant to do. It gives a philosophic view, tenable for our times, of the secret places where nature finds reconciliation with the Divine.' The Listener
'In Parenthesis is one of the enduring works that came out of the first world war. The Anathemata is more obviously a poem, in the sense in which Pound's Cantos is a poem. . . Both his books -- like his paintings -- have a thrice-distilled quality of finality and impersonality, like Gothic stone-carvings or the paintings on the walls of the Lascaux caves.' Kathleen Raine
'In Parenthesis is one of the enduring works that came out of the first world war. The Anathemata is more obviously a poem, in the sense in which Pound's Cantos is a poem. . . Both his books -- like his paintings -- have a thrice-distilled quality of finality and impersonality, like Gothic stone-carvings or the paintings on the walls of the Lascaux caves.' Kathleen Raine
- GenresPoetry20th Century
264 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1952
11 people are currently reading
576 people want to read
About the author
David Jones
10 books8 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.
David Jones is one of the finest modernist poets. He was born in London in 1895 and was both a painter and a poet. His reputation as a poet rests largely on two works: In Parenthesis and The Anathemata. The former is a deeply moving account of Jones' experiences in the trenches in the First World War.
In Parenthesis won the prestigious Hawthornden Prize in 1938. In his preface to the 1961 edition, T S Eliot had no hesitation in including Jones along with Joyce, Pound and himself as a premier exponent of literary modernism. The poem is a mixture of prose and verse and is accompanied by Jones' notes. What stands out is the fundamental decency and humanity of those men as they made their way to the slaughter on the front line. This journey is described with such brilliance that the reader becomes immersed in the moment and almost forgets the horrors that await. The notes are equally remarkable and could make a poem in themselves.
W H Auden callled The Anathemata "Very probably the finest long poem written in English in this century" and it is a remarkable work, packed full of the 'mixed data' referred to above and providing a dizzying tour of our cultural past. This too has notes provided by Jones and a long introduction which both explains and justifies the nature of its composition.
David Jones is one of the finest modernist poets. He was born in London in 1895 and was both a painter and a poet. His reputation as a poet rests largely on two works: In Parenthesis and The Anathemata. The former is a deeply moving account of Jones' experiences in the trenches in the First World War.
In Parenthesis won the prestigious Hawthornden Prize in 1938. In his preface to the 1961 edition, T S Eliot had no hesitation in including Jones along with Joyce, Pound and himself as a premier exponent of literary modernism. The poem is a mixture of prose and verse and is accompanied by Jones' notes. What stands out is the fundamental decency and humanity of those men as they made their way to the slaughter on the front line. This journey is described with such brilliance that the reader becomes immersed in the moment and almost forgets the horrors that await. The notes are equally remarkable and could make a poem in themselves.
W H Auden callled The Anathemata "Very probably the finest long poem written in English in this century" and it is a remarkable work, packed full of the 'mixed data' referred to above and providing a dizzying tour of our cultural past. This too has notes provided by Jones and a long introduction which both explains and justifies the nature of its composition.
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Displaying 1 - 22 of 22 reviews
January 22, 2018
David Jones explains in his "Preface" that the word anathemata means devoted things. They are objects and signs, some lifted up from lesser things, some lowered from a more exalted meaning, that "somehow are redeemed." "Things set up, lifted up, or in whatever manner made over to the gods." He explains the poem is composed of fragments which he associates with the Mass. He writes there's no plan but that each fragment carries an association with one or more other fragments. This sounds as if there's no narrative, but that's not true. Generally the poem begins in prehistory, advances to the mid-20th century and then returns to the time of the Crucifixion. Jones says that its shape is only that it returns to its beginning.
This is a difficult poem. Like The Waste Land, which is also difficult but rendered coherent with multiple readings, it is fragmentary. It's made up of snatches of Latin, obscure geographical and mythic references which are Welsh and medieval and Middle Eastern and a whole lot more, and it's seeded liberally with technical jargon relating to such things as sailing vessels and geologic formations. Difficult. It's a goulash of history and myth which, to me, seems to unite in a sea voyage from the past and the Eastern Mediterranean toward London and the present. Then the narrative sails back to Jerusalem and ends in the Crucifixion. But it's a mingling of history and all myth so that a mast is always a Cross, the crew of a ship is all mankind, the ship always an altar. All history is not only connected but co-existing--there's a moment near the poem's end where Roman history also seems to suggest the runup to WWII. Helen of Troy is the Virgin Mary who is Guinevere of Arthurian legend. The Grail Quest ends at the Last Supper.
Difficult. I admit to only a very general and partial understanding of the poem. But I can easily relate to Jones's overarching theme that all myths have a correspondence with all others and unite in serving the same purpose. It's more straightforward than you'd think to get from Helen of the Iliad to Rhiannon of the Welsh Mabinogi which plays a part in the poem.
I've had this on my shelf for a long time, intimidated by it. I couldn't have read it at this time (one begins a new reading year with big eyes and big ambitions) without An Introductory Guide to The Anathemata by Henry Summerfield, the kind of guide to dense books I call a Virgil. I actually annotated my copy before I read it, so that now each page looks walked on by a demented chicken. But I would've had little understanding at all otherwise And I know that out of this beginning will come greater understanding.
This is a difficult poem. Like The Waste Land, which is also difficult but rendered coherent with multiple readings, it is fragmentary. It's made up of snatches of Latin, obscure geographical and mythic references which are Welsh and medieval and Middle Eastern and a whole lot more, and it's seeded liberally with technical jargon relating to such things as sailing vessels and geologic formations. Difficult. It's a goulash of history and myth which, to me, seems to unite in a sea voyage from the past and the Eastern Mediterranean toward London and the present. Then the narrative sails back to Jerusalem and ends in the Crucifixion. But it's a mingling of history and all myth so that a mast is always a Cross, the crew of a ship is all mankind, the ship always an altar. All history is not only connected but co-existing--there's a moment near the poem's end where Roman history also seems to suggest the runup to WWII. Helen of Troy is the Virgin Mary who is Guinevere of Arthurian legend. The Grail Quest ends at the Last Supper.
Difficult. I admit to only a very general and partial understanding of the poem. But I can easily relate to Jones's overarching theme that all myths have a correspondence with all others and unite in serving the same purpose. It's more straightforward than you'd think to get from Helen of the Iliad to Rhiannon of the Welsh Mabinogi which plays a part in the poem.
I've had this on my shelf for a long time, intimidated by it. I couldn't have read it at this time (one begins a new reading year with big eyes and big ambitions) without An Introductory Guide to The Anathemata by Henry Summerfield, the kind of guide to dense books I call a Virgil. I actually annotated my copy before I read it, so that now each page looks walked on by a demented chicken. But I would've had little understanding at all otherwise And I know that out of this beginning will come greater understanding.
August 27, 2020
First thoughts after a first reading, rather than a review.
In his Preface Jones states “for the Artist the question is ‘does it’ not ‘ought it’”. But The Anathemata rides on an “ought’. And that ‘ought’ is a very dubious way of thinking about words.
The preface is not a logical and concise argument. I’m not sure if what passes as the argument works, but I do know that at its heart is a failure to make an important distinction between literary allusion (what words do in texts) and what individual words can do in the language.
To some readers no allusions are obscure; to others all are. When Eliot wrote “The Journey of the Magi”, given his readership it is unlikely that he felt a need to explain who they were, or what the three trees on the hill, the white horse, or the men dicing for clothes alluded to. Today the poem needs footnotes, and even in an Anglican school I have given up using it.
Jones, quoting C.S.Lewis calls this “unshared background” and implies that his footnotes can “open this up”. So if you have read the Mabinogion before you start on Jones. you don’t need to be told who Branwen is. Her name evokes a situation and a story. If you haven’t read it, the footnote can tell you who she was and where to find her story. That much is straightforward. The question that goes begging is what is the effect of the allusion, which context does not explain, on someone who didn’t know the story before reading and what happens with that association after you’ve looked it up.
This problem is universal when writing poetry and hoping your readers know some of the poems you do. Jones like Pound, had been down some fairly obscure rabbit holes and was unlikely to meet anyone who would know the same combination of obscure texts as he did.
However, Jones takes the argument one step further and here I think ‘ought to’ kicks in. For Jones, the word Wood, carries in it the meaning “wood of the cross” and a whole spiders web of linked associations the word ‘wood’ will evoke.
For this to work Jones has to believe that a word is not just a polysemic sign which is given meanings by current usages, but somehow a fixed object like a weathered stone which contains all its prior meanings and usages, and all their historical connotations, and that the personal usages are somehow drowned by the cultural and historical. But who associates loaf with Lord, or Music with dream? Cross might well evoke Calvary or Crusaders (or both) for Christian readers, but it might also evoke childhood memories of Mummy being cross or learning how to cross the road, or dotting the Is and crossing the Ts, or Hot cross buns or riding a cock horse and those might be much more present for a reader than the religious or historical.
The sound represented by the letters CROSS does not automatically explode onto the mind the mental image of Calvary. Nor is it capable of doing so without a great deal of help. (In Eliot’s poem the three trees evoke Calvary because they are at the end of the (then well known story) story that begins with the Birth the Magi have come to witness. In that context three trees is not random nor can they stand for an ancient Celtic fertility cult. Sorry Robert)
But if the idea is problematic with English usage Jones’ desire to apply it to foreign words takes it even further. His argument is dodgy.
'Or to give a concrete instance: whether within its context my use of the Welsh title ‘Gwledlig’ was avoidable and whether the English translation ‘land-ruler’ could have been so conditioned and juxtaposed as to incant what ‘Gwledig’ incants . The ‘grave problems’ referred to a few paragraphs back have mostly arisen over questions of this sort. It must be understood that it is not a question of ‘translation’ or even of ‘finding an equivalent word’, it is something much more complex. ‘Tsar’ will mean one thing and ‘Caesar’ another to the end of time.'
Last things first. Words change their meanings . They shed old ones. Lord and Dream are good examples. So there is no way of knowing what a word will mean at the end of time. Ironically Gwledig is an inconvenient and probably unintentional example. It’s given twice in my Welsh Dictionary. Jones’s usage is marked as obsolete or archaic. The modern meaning is given as ‘rural rustic boorish’. So the word does not mean one thing til the end of time and a modern welsh reader might find the whole thing as confusing as non Welsh speakers.
Secondly, Branwen exists as a character in a story which gives the sign a (reasonably) stable resonance and meaning. Tsar, Caesar and Kaiser are words in the language. They may all have the same root but in English we don’t write about Julius Tsar or Kaiser Peter the Great, not do we talk about Caesar Bill. Unless we’re Monty Python or the Goons. Whatever their origins in other languages, we use them differently in English and meaning is always about context and usage.
While this might seem to support the argument, English speakers don’t use the word Gwledig. It has no meaning for a modern English Speaker. Having to explain a specific archaic meaning of a foreign word in a footnote does nothing except question why the foreign word was used in the first place. I think Jones’ poem, like a lot of the Later Cantos, degenerates into a private language. These words may have had powerful associations for him. Whether or not is it possible to make such eclectic meanings available to anyone else is a question I don’t know the answer to yet.
So currently I think Jones’ text relies far too heavily on a theorised “ought to” and the real question for the reader if they can side step the usual modernist intimidation is, “does it?”
Thoughts after a third reading.
I need to read it again.
In his Preface Jones states “for the Artist the question is ‘does it’ not ‘ought it’”. But The Anathemata rides on an “ought’. And that ‘ought’ is a very dubious way of thinking about words.
The preface is not a logical and concise argument. I’m not sure if what passes as the argument works, but I do know that at its heart is a failure to make an important distinction between literary allusion (what words do in texts) and what individual words can do in the language.
To some readers no allusions are obscure; to others all are. When Eliot wrote “The Journey of the Magi”, given his readership it is unlikely that he felt a need to explain who they were, or what the three trees on the hill, the white horse, or the men dicing for clothes alluded to. Today the poem needs footnotes, and even in an Anglican school I have given up using it.
Jones, quoting C.S.Lewis calls this “unshared background” and implies that his footnotes can “open this up”. So if you have read the Mabinogion before you start on Jones. you don’t need to be told who Branwen is. Her name evokes a situation and a story. If you haven’t read it, the footnote can tell you who she was and where to find her story. That much is straightforward. The question that goes begging is what is the effect of the allusion, which context does not explain, on someone who didn’t know the story before reading and what happens with that association after you’ve looked it up.
This problem is universal when writing poetry and hoping your readers know some of the poems you do. Jones like Pound, had been down some fairly obscure rabbit holes and was unlikely to meet anyone who would know the same combination of obscure texts as he did.
However, Jones takes the argument one step further and here I think ‘ought to’ kicks in. For Jones, the word Wood, carries in it the meaning “wood of the cross” and a whole spiders web of linked associations the word ‘wood’ will evoke.
For this to work Jones has to believe that a word is not just a polysemic sign which is given meanings by current usages, but somehow a fixed object like a weathered stone which contains all its prior meanings and usages, and all their historical connotations, and that the personal usages are somehow drowned by the cultural and historical. But who associates loaf with Lord, or Music with dream? Cross might well evoke Calvary or Crusaders (or both) for Christian readers, but it might also evoke childhood memories of Mummy being cross or learning how to cross the road, or dotting the Is and crossing the Ts, or Hot cross buns or riding a cock horse and those might be much more present for a reader than the religious or historical.
The sound represented by the letters CROSS does not automatically explode onto the mind the mental image of Calvary. Nor is it capable of doing so without a great deal of help. (In Eliot’s poem the three trees evoke Calvary because they are at the end of the (then well known story) story that begins with the Birth the Magi have come to witness. In that context three trees is not random nor can they stand for an ancient Celtic fertility cult. Sorry Robert)
But if the idea is problematic with English usage Jones’ desire to apply it to foreign words takes it even further. His argument is dodgy.
'Or to give a concrete instance: whether within its context my use of the Welsh title ‘Gwledlig’ was avoidable and whether the English translation ‘land-ruler’ could have been so conditioned and juxtaposed as to incant what ‘Gwledig’ incants . The ‘grave problems’ referred to a few paragraphs back have mostly arisen over questions of this sort. It must be understood that it is not a question of ‘translation’ or even of ‘finding an equivalent word’, it is something much more complex. ‘Tsar’ will mean one thing and ‘Caesar’ another to the end of time.'
Last things first. Words change their meanings . They shed old ones. Lord and Dream are good examples. So there is no way of knowing what a word will mean at the end of time. Ironically Gwledig is an inconvenient and probably unintentional example. It’s given twice in my Welsh Dictionary. Jones’s usage is marked as obsolete or archaic. The modern meaning is given as ‘rural rustic boorish’. So the word does not mean one thing til the end of time and a modern welsh reader might find the whole thing as confusing as non Welsh speakers.
Secondly, Branwen exists as a character in a story which gives the sign a (reasonably) stable resonance and meaning. Tsar, Caesar and Kaiser are words in the language. They may all have the same root but in English we don’t write about Julius Tsar or Kaiser Peter the Great, not do we talk about Caesar Bill. Unless we’re Monty Python or the Goons. Whatever their origins in other languages, we use them differently in English and meaning is always about context and usage.
While this might seem to support the argument, English speakers don’t use the word Gwledig. It has no meaning for a modern English Speaker. Having to explain a specific archaic meaning of a foreign word in a footnote does nothing except question why the foreign word was used in the first place. I think Jones’ poem, like a lot of the Later Cantos, degenerates into a private language. These words may have had powerful associations for him. Whether or not is it possible to make such eclectic meanings available to anyone else is a question I don’t know the answer to yet.
So currently I think Jones’ text relies far too heavily on a theorised “ought to” and the real question for the reader if they can side step the usual modernist intimidation is, “does it?”
Thoughts after a third reading.
I need to read it again.
February 2, 2021
Mellifluous, fascinating, perplexing....
March 30, 2025
3.75
I wanted to like this more than I did. really fascinated by the concept, and the gathering of medieval fragments etc.... but the poem itself felt a bit like a watered down and massively overlength version of The Waste Land.
I wanted to like this more than I did. really fascinated by the concept, and the gathering of medieval fragments etc.... but the poem itself felt a bit like a watered down and massively overlength version of The Waste Land.
January 16, 2024
This book is the unknown pleasing culmination of high modernism. It's a kindly and gentle-- which doesn't mean understandable, of course-- book length Waste Land with more explicable notes, or shorter, less insane, Cantos; in either case Christianized.
Here are some of the notes, which, as in the Waste Land, are a poem in themselves:
"What is pleaded in the Mass is precisely the argosy or voyage of the Redeemer, consisting of his entire sufferings and his death, his conquest of hades, his resurrection and his return in triumph to heaven. It is this that is offered to the Trinity (Cf. 'Myself to myself' as in the Havamal is said of Odin) on behalf of us argonauts and of the whole argosy of mankind, and, in some sense, of all sentient being, and, perhaps, of insentient too, for, as Paul says, 'The whole of nature, as we know, groans in a common travail all the while.'"
Fare forward, you crazy kids.
Here are some of the notes, which, as in the Waste Land, are a poem in themselves:
"What is pleaded in the Mass is precisely the argosy or voyage of the Redeemer, consisting of his entire sufferings and his death, his conquest of hades, his resurrection and his return in triumph to heaven. It is this that is offered to the Trinity (Cf. 'Myself to myself' as in the Havamal is said of Odin) on behalf of us argonauts and of the whole argosy of mankind, and, in some sense, of all sentient being, and, perhaps, of insentient too, for, as Paul says, 'The whole of nature, as we know, groans in a common travail all the while.'"
Fare forward, you crazy kids.
January 8, 2025
Searching where the kitchen midden tells of the decline which with the receding cold marked the recession of the Magdalenian splendours.
Yet there he brights fragmented protomorphs where lies the rudimentary bowl.
How else
multifariam multisque modis
the splendour of forms yet to come?
[78]
Over other than all this, and excepting only these terminal forms, mantling the whole leaning column (which was the live base for these) covering for the most part the handsome, well-shaped Dalmatian tunic of gold stuff inter-threaded green (the stitched-on dark laticlaves kermes-dipt) that had beneath it the convenient, well-fitting, glossy under-gown of shining fire-stone, that hid all but entirely the long, bleached, well-adjusted, comfortable vest that sheathed immediately the breathing marble.
Habiting all and over all
from top to toe (almost)
ample and enfolding
in many various folds
with the many lights
playing variously on the folds
her wide lacerna.
[202]
Yet there he brights fragmented protomorphs where lies the rudimentary bowl.
How else
multifariam multisque modis
the splendour of forms yet to come?
[78]
Over other than all this, and excepting only these terminal forms, mantling the whole leaning column (which was the live base for these) covering for the most part the handsome, well-shaped Dalmatian tunic of gold stuff inter-threaded green (the stitched-on dark laticlaves kermes-dipt) that had beneath it the convenient, well-fitting, glossy under-gown of shining fire-stone, that hid all but entirely the long, bleached, well-adjusted, comfortable vest that sheathed immediately the breathing marble.
Habiting all and over all
from top to toe (almost)
ample and enfolding
in many various folds
with the many lights
playing variously on the folds
her wide lacerna.
[202]
August 21, 2019
Read over the course of two months with a small reading group in Louisville, Kentucky. Undoubtedly the most difficult and ambitious piece of writing I've ever encountered. At times dense to the point of impenetrability; at other times, resplendent in its clarity and richness. Jones has a penchant for making every single one of his images serve as symbols for at least three things at once: for instance, the breaking up of glaciers over a rocky landscape = civilizational schismogenesis and the spreading of peoples across the globe = priest's breaking of the eucharist. In other words, the particular (the here and now) is related to the universal (the whole of culture) is related to the divine eternal (triune God) -- this is, as far as I can tell, the central principle of his vision of the world.
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July 27, 2018There’s no way I can rate this book. Although I understood most of the words, I understood no more than a third, maybe, of the sentences and clauses. A kind of history of England, I think, and of its Christianity. Some lines are beautiful music, occasionally—as in the first few pages of the final section—a kind of speech reached me with a glimmer of understanding. But overall, a mystery, a music, maybe, a sound, but one whose “sense” is quite cloaked.
May 22, 2008
i think i prefer the footnotes to the text... so much information, it's like a party in my brain and the history of the world is invited
January 2, 2020
Great, but good grief!
September 15, 2023
This has to be the most difficult poem I have ever read - Eliot or Pound pale in comparison. Highly allusive, taking in everything from biblical imagery to Welsh myth to typically fractured modernist writing, I am pretty sure more than half went right over my head. I will definitely have to re-read this someday.
December 3, 2017
T.S. Eliot wrote to David Jones to say that he had to read this poem three times to understand it. I understand W. H. Auden read and re-read it without ever figuring it out, but with much enjoyment. I'm in the W. H. Auden camp, so far. I rate it five stars out of deference and propriety.
August 21, 2019
wtf did i just read
May 30, 2022
And people think The Waste Land is a difficult poem. HA! I’ll need to read this again and again to fully appreciate it, but it is beautiful. I prefer his In Parenthesis though.
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October 24, 2022Read the Angle-Land and Lady of the Pool sections for class and I have no idea what any of it meant
Read
June 11, 2024Fantastic; well beyond my understanding. Once I brush up on Catholic rites, Norse and Welsh folklore, Latin, and Ancient Greek myth, I'll be able to give this the 5 stars it deserves.
December 31, 2024
A dense, complex, sometimes over wordy and very often very beautiful poem.
October 28, 2025
sympathetic to its ambition but ultimately its piety is dull and, despite its concept, it's still provincial
January 20, 2008
another great steal from shakes & co for 7 euro either their too kind or totally stupid
February 10, 2008
Too dense and convoluted for even my somewhat academic tastes, its moments of lyrical beauty and historical arcana make it worth the effort if you are in the proper mood.
July 20, 2008
Nearly impenetrable in parts, but gorgeously mysterious. Something I will continue to return to time and again, just to revel in its language beauty and eek out more understanding.
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October 26, 2022
[ to review at a later date - possibly even re-read at a later date as well, though not urgent ]
Displaying 1 - 22 of 22 reviews