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W. H. Auden called David Jones's The Anathemata "one of the most important poems of our time" and "probably the finest long poem in English in this century." A growing number of poets and critics agree. Unquestionably, The Anathemata is a work of vital and all-inclusive imagination. Its subject is no less than western civilization from its prehistoric beginnings. The work's frame of reference moves from modern times to the Jerusalem of Christ, to geological prehistory, and on to republican Rome, to classical Greece, and to a merchant ship in the second millennium B.C. The time then shifts to Anglo-Saxon England, to nineteenth-century London, to late-medieval Britain, to papal Rome, back to Jerusalem and finally back to modern times. In all this there are no associations of a personal and private nature such as mar the Cantos of Pound. Nor are the myths that inform the poem private, like those of Blake; they derive from historical traditions—classical, scriptural and medieval, Welsh, Norse and English. Because
In contrast to the poem's preface and notes, which mostly explain the work's cultural and historical matrices, the marginalia comment directly on specific aspects of the poem itself. Sometimes fragmentary and cryptic, the glosses candidly record David Jones's personal clarifications and interpretations of the text. For example, they assign major importance to the motif of the voyage, the symbol of the ship, the figure of the captain and that of the mother of Christ. Moreover, the glosses imply a thematic interrelationship between this motif and these images. Certain of the marginalia, further-more, suggest what appear to be some of the structural principles and relationships informing the poem's composition. This is especially likely if, as specific marginal references suggest, many of the glosses were written within a year of the poem's publication.[3] In various ways, the marginal glosses of David Jones constitute an authoritative commentary on The Anathemata.
One of the copies of the poem in which the marginalia appear was, according to the poet's inscription on the front end-papers, "received from Fabers, Oct 17th 1952". In this copy are a series of brief, hastily written glosses entered by David Jones on the fifth of May, 1953, as he listened to the two-hour radio dramatization of sections of The Anathemata on the B.B.C. Third Programme. These marginal comments, which record a mixed reaction
In the following list of marginalia, I omit the many and repetitive comments on the radio broadcast, together with David Jones' occasional protests at the radio-script's deletion of lines and passages from sections of the poem. All other marginalia, that gloss the poem directly, are recorded below, under the headings of the sections of the poem in which they appear. The glosses are preceded by page and line numbers. In most instances, these are followed by words of the poem in quotation marks and then by the poet's marginal gloss in italics. An asterisk marks page and line references to the copy of the poem in which Jones recorded his reactions to the radio broadcast. I have, in most cases, interpreted the relationship of gloss to text.
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