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 us home all point to the pilgrim's path along the road of sanctification. With the important exception of "Four Quartets", Eliot directed much of his creative energies after "Ash Wednesday" to writing plays in verse, mostly comedies or plays with redemptive endings. He was long a critic and admirer of Elizabethan and Jacobean verse drama; witness his allusions to Webster, Thomas Middleton, William Shakespeare and Thomas Kyd in "The Waste Land". In a 1933 lecture he said "Every poet would like, I fancy, to be able to think that he had some direct social utility . . . . He