"It is our duty to sing"

Great War veteran David Jones's poem about the war, In Parenthesis, has been attacked by literary critics Paul Fussell and Evelyn Cobley on the grounds that the poem, usually read as an instance of "literature of protest" against the war, indicates Jones's ideological complicity with the war through its extensive allusions to heroic Celtic myth, British literature, and Catholic liturgy. This thesis argues that Jones's intricate allusive network represents a mythopoetic method of endurance, a way of making order amidst the chaos of the Western Front. Jones's mythopoetic method, which I call allusive "seeing," serves as both a psychological defense mechanism against the war's strangeness and horror and a protest against the perception that because of the industrial, unheroic nature of the Great War, the soldiers who fought and died in it cannot be considered heroes.