Introduction
The Introduction situates David Jones’s work as a poet–artist within the broader currents of high and late modernism, particularly within the context of a tradition of medievalism in twentieth-century poetry. It draws on Alexander Nagel’s conception of the medieval modern to show how Jones approaches the culture and history of the early Middle Ages as a form of live material open to play and adaptation. The Introduction also reframes our understanding of David Jones’s perception of himself as Anglo-Welsh in relation to changing attitudes to early medieval Welsh (Celtic) and English (Anglo-Saxon/Teutonic) history over the course of his lifetime. This discussion introduces the monograph’s central argument: as a poet of the medieval modern, Jones plays with and reworks early medieval English histories, narratives, and artefacts in order to challenge the singularity and exceptionalism of an ‘Anglo-Saxon’ canon.