The early Middle Ages provided twentieth-century poets with the material to re-imagine and rework local, religious, and national identities in their writing. Poet of the Medieval Modern focuses on a key figure within this tradition, the Anglo-Welsh poet and artist David Jones (1895-1974): representing the first extended study of the influence of early medieval English culture and history on Jones and his novel-length late modernist poem The Anathemata (1952). Jones''s second major poetic project after In Parenthesis (1937), The Anathemata fuses Jones''s visual and verbal arts to write a Catholic history of Britain as told through the history of man-as-artist. Drawing on unpublished archival material including manuscripts, sketches, correspondence, and, most significantly, the marginalia from David Jones''s Library, this volume reads with Jones in order to trouble the distinction between poetry and scholarship. Placing this underappreciated figure firmly at the centre of new development
