Reading the Influence of David Jones on the Anti-Empiricist Poetics of Philip Gross

Paper presented at the David Jones Research Centre, Wales, 2023.

This paper studies how the poetry of Wales-based poet, Philip Gross develops on the tradition of anti-empiricist landscape poetry, as practiced by David Jones. Gross’s poetry, specifically Mappa Mundi (2003) and The Water Table (2009), builds on Jones’s practice of imbuing the Welsh landscape with religious symbolism. In The Anathemata, Jones characterizes the Welsh landscape as sacred, with the individual’s relation to water bodies carrying the significance of Christian ritual. The influence of Jones’s poetic style, that of perceiving the fundamental sign-making at the core of any artistic creation as a religious activity, can be found in Philip Gross’s poetry where Gross makes the Welsh landscape into the basis for the study of the alchemical transformation that orders Christian belief in the sacrament. In Mappa Mundi by exploring the family of Welsh words demarcating the landscape and revisiting the forgotten Celtic spiritual associations of the landscape, Gross’s poetry invites a remapping of the poems within a tradition of Welsh verse that goes back to the medieval age through David Jones. In The Water Table, Gross studies how geographical transformations effected by tides conflate the interiority of religious experience with the external, sensorial apprehension of the landscape. This paper will study how Philip Gross’s poetry characterizes the tidal landscapes of Wales and signals the role of water in shaping the land as an act of form-making that intertwines the figural and the literal.