This paper will explore the way that the poetry of David Jones, while generally recognised as being modernist, nevertheless promotes a continuation of the Western literary tradition (as opposed to more revolutionary strands of modernism), but does this while introducing a self-conscious understanding of the role and workings of tradition, an element lacking in pre-modern traditional literature. Other figures with a similar interest in the viability of a self-consciously understood practice of (literary or philosophical) tradition, in continuity with pre-modern tradition, but in modern conditions (Thomas Mann, John Henry Newman, Alasdair MacIntyre), will also be discussed.
I shall examine the theory of art developed by David Jones, the twentieth-century Anglo-Welsh poet and artist (especially in his essay “Art and Sacrament”), in the light of a comparison with the theory of art propounded by Hans-Georg Gadamer, the twentieth-century German philosopher in the phenomenological tradition (especially his essay “Die Aktualität des Schönen”), not claiming influence, but highlighting striking parallels.
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