David Jones and the Self-Conscious Uses of Tradition

Abstract 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.