Romana Huk, Notre Dame University
Title: “Sacrament as ars: Down-to-earth devotion in the poetry of David Jones (pursued through a reading of ‘ A, a, a Domine Deus’)”
November 10, 2017
In this excerpt from a lengthy chapter on David Jones in her current book project, Romana Huk re-reads the implications of this major modernist’s “theopoetics” and raises questions about how scholars in the rapidly developing field of “religion and literature” have been approaching his work. A survivor of the Battle of the Somme and, like many after the Great War, a Catholic convert, Jones has been read as an apologist for his new faith and as the most radically-experimental of the WWI p
oets, though few have linked these potentially divisive aspects of the writer’s work. Professor Huk, who has written about avant-garde British poetry for more than a quarter of a century, and who now also edits the journal Religion & Literature, attempts to draw this complex poet’s innovative religious thinking out through his art, as well as through his surprising argument about what happened in “the Cenacle” in his longest and most challenging essay, “Art and Sacrament.” The poem named in her title can easily be found on the internet, but she recommends the following site because Colin Wilcockson, an old friend of Jones’, reproduces it properly there near the start of his brief essay (which also offers helpful insights for those who desire them, though they are not necessarily Prof. Huk’s): http://www.flashpointmag.com/colineliot.htm
