Jared Marcel Pollen at Commonweal:
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.”
more here.
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