The Shape of Meaning in the Poetry of David Jones

This inclusive in-depth interpretation of Jones’s poetry is a revision of The Shape of Meaning in the Poetry of David Jones, originally published by University of Toronto Press in 1988. It is expanded to include Jones’s inter-war poetry and the relation of his book illustration to spatial form in the long poems. The reviewer for Albion 23:1 (Spring 1991) writes: ‘anyone who approaches the work of David Jones from now on will have to contend with [this] monumental study …. of sources and analogues, of autobiographical influences, of symbolic form, and … cultural analysis…. clearly determined to establish Jones’s place in the canon of literary modernism and, indeed, to reshape our sense of the modernist tradition. … the entire book echoes Hugh MacDiarmid’s evaluation of Jones as “the greatest native English poet of the twentieth century” …. The scrupulous detail of [Dilworth’s] interpretations unquestionably illuminates and challenges. He defines and explores … the visual and spatial … structure …; the synchronic imperative of [the long poems]; the “tonal freeplay” … and “subgeneric metamorphosis” …. which constitute a kind of literary shape-shifting’. Making extensive use of previously unpublished manuscript material, this book is foundational for subsequent Jones scholarship. Revised and expanded, it remains cutting edge.