jones / watkins collection

Summary

Introduced by T. S. Eliot, their editor at Faber & Faber, David Jones (1895-1974) and Vernon Watkins (1906-1967) rarely met (or phoned), as Watkins worked at a bank in Swansea while Jones holed up in a Harrow bedsit, but their exchanges preserve some of the most sustained discussions of poetry, poets, and poetics in Jones's extant correspondence. Watkins, who had heartily reviewed In Parenthesis in 1938, coaxed from Jones his first post-Anathemata pieces into print. First came "The Wall," in the Dylan Thomas-dedicated November 1955 issue of Chicago's Poetry magazine, then newly edited by the poet Henry Rago. This marked Jones's first stateside publication. Watkins re-presented "The Wall," with Jones's corrections, in a pamphlet of the Poetry Book Society of November 1957. That version benefits from their two-years' back-and-forth about the typescripts' typographical and punctuational niceties, which spilled over into detailed instructions from Jones to the Society's secretary Eric Walter White. Another of Jones's fragments, "The Tutelar of the The Place," Watkins typed in 1960; it appeared in Poetry's January 1961 issue.

Scope

29 manuscript letters from David Jones to Vernon Watkins, dated 1953-1964 (originals held in Burns Library, Boston College)

View the letters from Jones to Watkins here: https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/collections/davidjones/20

Key people

Catherine Enwright (grant lead), Huw Jones and Yasmin Faghihi (TEI instructors in 2024 workshop), Anna Svendsen and Tom Berenato (coordinating editors), Kasya O’Connor Grant (Graduate Intern)

Editors

Alex Cvancara; Marisa Lally; Minh Le; Jenna Mirchin; Kasya O’Connor Grant; Jennie Rebecca-Falcetta

Funding

Award of $2,500 from the Institute of Liberal Arts Minor Grant and $10,000 for the Academic Technology Innovation Grant (both Boston College). Collaboration of Catherine Enwright (Boston College), Huw Jones and Yasmin Faghihi (Cambridge Digital Humanities), and Tom Berenato and Anna Svendsen (David Jones Research Center). Covered:

  • TEI training workshop (including purchase of software) at Boston College in partnership with Cambridge Digital Humanities using the letters from David Jones to Vernon Watkins (originals in the Burns Library, Boston College)

  • exhibition of archival original material from Jones’s papers at the Burns library, Boston College

Future

The letters will be encoded in TEI in fall 2024 (it will be a special project of our graduate intern, Kasya O’Connor Grant) with transcriptions made available alongside images on the Cambridge Digital Library.

Image Credit

Taken from letter of Jones to Vernon Watkins, 14 March 1950 (MS1986-01 box 1 folder 45, Burns Library, Boston College). Copyright: Trustees of the David Jones Estate.

All images reproduced with the kind permission of the Trustees of the David Jones Estate/Bridgman Images.