Abstract

Taking into account Jones’s adoption of principles of modernist poetics—juxtaposition, allusion, and parataxis, all geared “to create newness”—this essay examines the theological ramifications for the poet’s breaking down, in his semi-autobiographical World War I poem, of modernist order and control. Jones unravels modernist aesthetics, conveying their inadequacy to the brutal realities of war. A space for religious belief appears through this process, but one not of heightened understanding; instead it is a via negativa, an unknowing, consonant with ideas from medieval mysticism but applied to the modern Waste Land. This pattern is borne out in Jones’s handling of the medieval trope of “misadventure,” his references to Eliot, his play on the word “line,” and his development of the concept of “parenthesis.”