David Jones (artist-poet) unusual, if not unique, in that he created admired and generally recognised important works both in the field of poetry and in the visual arts. However, according to the poet and critic Kathleen Raine, despite"the supreme quality of his art... he has never at any time been a widely-read, still less a fashionable, writer, nor is he ever likely to become so for his work is too subtle and learned for popular tastes" ("Sewanee Review", 1967). In 1938 T. S. Eliot called "In Parenthesis" a 'work of genius', and Graham Greene, in 1980, "among the great poems of the century".
T. S. Eliot has had a blue plaque on it since 1986. For a poet of his stature, Eliot produced a relatively small number of poems. He was aware of this even early in his career. He wrote to J.H. Woods, one of his former Harvard professors, "My reputation in London is built upon one small volume of verse, and is kept up by printing two or three more poems in a year. The only thing that matters is that these should be perfect in their kind, so that each should be an event." Typically, Eliot first published his poems individually in periodicals