Shakespeare And The Nature Of Modern Warfare

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It may be thought odd that Dilworth does not refer to earlier modernist ideas of 'spatial form' here, some of which Wilson Knight's, with reference to Shakespeare's last plays for instance could even have been influential on Jones.

In any case, despite Dilworth's efforts, I am not persuaded. The actual experience of reading Jones's texts offers few invitations to the sensing of such overarching forms, since any reading has to be so determinedly linear, and even interruptedly linear, as, in the later poems, one's eye must dance up and down between text and footnote.

In addition, it must seem to the unconvinced reader that Jones has gone to almost Oulipean lengths to keep such forms hidden; whereas even Oulipean poets like Paul Muldoon seem in practice to Jewelry Store want their shapes even across separate books to be noticed, admired and interpreted.

Dilworth seems to require ...
... the idea, however, partly because he wants to make extremely high claims for Jones as a formally modernist high achiever. Admiring him so passionately, he is understandably regretful, even resentful, that Jones's reputation is, now as ever, so uncertain. Hence the flurry of what must seem hyperbolic comparisons which bring the book to a close.

Not only is Jones, along with Eliot, Joyce, Woolf and Beckett 'one of the five greatest modern writers', but his poems 'call for comparison to the inclusive, culturally authoritative, epic poems of Homer, Virgil, Dante and Milton'. These comparisons prompt the perhaps unworthy thought that this critic may well have spent too long with these poems.

Jones is an extraordinary writer; and numerous people, notably poets themselves, and poets of very different persuasions both from one another and from Jones himself, continue to get, and stay, interested in him, and even influenced by him. Jones must, as a matter of absolute cultural necessity, be kept properly in print, as he is not at present.

However, for various reasons, he will remain a minority taste. Almost despite himself, Dilworth offers us what is probably the strongest reason, as he makes claims in favor of Jones's lack of irony. 'No other modern writer,' he says, 'is so free of the armour of irony, a modernist habit of mind masking fear with presumption of Tiffany Jewelry superior viewpoint.' It is surely impossible for Jones to have written the 'epic' of modernity if he is so little in tune with the temper of his time.

Dilworth's own condemnation here is myopic and even itself condescending, considering irony so. Modern (and modernist) irony is the necessary response to the complexity of modern experience, and sometimes, indeed, to its horror, which may well render writers fearful. In any case, even if what Dilworth says here is generally accurate about Jones, and is certainly underwritten by his theology, does Dilworth not find irony in, at least, the use of Henry Fin In Parenthesis!

In that poem Fluellen, Shakespeare's common soldier with his comic 'disciplines of war', is moved decisively to the centre of the text and becomes the victim of tragedy when the tutelary spirit, the Queen of the Woods, offering a benediction for a dead soldier, is 'careful for the Disciplines of the Wars'. This is an ironic re-alignment which offers an entirely fearless comment on both Shakespeare and the nature of modern warfare.