He was wounded at Mametz Wood, recuperated in the Midlands, was returned to the Ypres Salient, and joined in the attack on Pilckem Ridge at Passchendaele in 1917.

John O'Connor, who suggested Jones visit Eric Gill and his guild of Catholic craftsmen at Ditchling in Sussex.

Influenced by Gill, Jones entered the Catholic Church in 1921, chiefly, he said, because it seemed "real" in contrast to Christian alternatives.

and, for the Golden Cockerel Press, Gulliver's Travels and engraved a large, elaborate frontispiece for a Welsh translation of the Book of Ecclesiastes, Llyfr y Pregethwr.

In 1927 Jones made friends with Jim Ede, at the Tate Gallery, who introduced him to art critics and prospective buyers, including Helen Sutherland, who became a patron.

It included the cultural historian Christopher Dawson, the philosopher E. I. Watkin, the type-designer Stanley Morison, Harman Grisewood, Bernard Wall, Eric Gill, Martin D'Arcy and others.

To these discussions, Jones contributed his psychological theory of culture, focusing on the balance of utility (efficiency) and gratuity (beauty, truth, goodness) required for healthy civilization.

The Chelsea Group would be the matrix of The Anathemata, The Tablet, edited by Tom Burns, and the Third Programme, the BBC's cultural radio station developed and produced by Grisewood.

Though Jones was unable to paint, his visual works were shown in Chicago in 1933, at the Venice Biennale in 1934, and at the World's Fair, New York, in 1939.

He painted a few important pictures, and to celebrate the wedding of his friend Harman Grisewood to Margaret Bailey, wrote Prothalamion and Epithalamion, which were eventually published posthumously.

[1] This led Jones throughout the 1950s to make many beautiful painted inscriptions (an art form he invented), along with sometimes numinous still lifes of flowers in glass chalices.

In 1954 an Arts Council tour of his work visited Aberystwyth, Cardiff, Swansea, Edinburgh and the Tate Gallery, London.

In 1960, Stevenson began prescribing barbiturates and other harmful drugs that sent Jones's creative life into a virtual standstill for the next 12 years, though he struggled to revise and shape mid-length poems for inclusion in The Sleeping Lord (1974), a project he managed to complete after the prescriptions were terminated in the summer of 1972.

[6] In 1970 Jones broke the ball of his femur in a fall and thereafter lived in a room at Calvary Nursing Home in Harrow, where he was regularly visited by friends and died in his sleep on 27–28 October 1974.

[7] Although Jones began exhibiting paintings in London galleries in 1919, his chief public creative expression was initially engraving.

In the 7 and 5 Society he was influenced by Winnifred Nicholson in painting freely, relying on more colour, less line, coming close to abstraction.

[1] In Parenthesis (1937) is an epic narrative poem based on Jones's first seven months in the trenches culminating in the assault on Mametz Wood during the Battle of the Somme.

His literary debut, it won high praise from reviewers, many of them former servicemen, for whom its vivid language evoked the realities of trench warfare.

They saw its allusions to the horrors of romance and to the battles of history and legend (all seen as defeats) as accurately expressing the feelings of men in combat.

The poem draws on literary influences from the 6th-century Welsh epic Y Gododdin to Shakespeare's Henry V, Thomas Malory's Morte d'Arthur, the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins and Anabase by Saint-John Perse (translated by Eliot), in an attempt to be true to the experiences of combatants.

That and the reader's having got to know the infantrymen involved makes the concluding visitation of the dead by the Queen of the Woods a deeply moving literary experience.

[1] Also epic in length (244 pages with Introduction), The Anathemata (1952) is Jones's poetic summa, a symbolic dramatic, multi-voiced anatomy of Western culture.

Symbolically the structure means that the Eucharist as a super-sign of God's loving union with humanity is contained and sustained by everything in the poem, from Anglo-Saxon cultural genocide to a medieval lavender seller's remembered sexual liaisons.

[1] Until 1960, Jones worked intermittently on a long poem, of which material in The Anathemata had initially been meant to form part.

The final mid-length poem is a darkly comical consideration of an assault during the Battle of Passchendaele, in which Western tradition and its values confront mechanized mass suicide.

More than any other collection or sequence of poems in English, these works test traditional values in the face of modern mechanized war, technological pragmatism and political totalitarianism.

Jones's occasional essays on art, literature, religion and history, introductions to books and talks on the BBC Third Programme have been collected in Epoch and Artist (Faber, 1959), The Dying Gaul (Faber, 1978) and David Jones on Religion, Politics, and Culture: Unpublished Prose (Bloomsbury, 2018).

The most important essays include "Art and Sacrament", his fullest exposition of his theory of culture; "Use and Sign", his most succinct exposition of that theory; "Introduction to 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner'", intriguing in itself and helpful for appreciating The Anathemata; and "The Myth of Arthur", deepening understanding of "The Hunt" and the concluding, eponymous poem in The Sleeping Lord and, with these two poems, an important contribution to the Matter of Britain'.

Harold Rosenberg wrote that Jones's essays on culture "formulated the axiomatic precondition for understanding contemporary creation."

Several notable exhibitions of his engravings, paintings and inscriptions, during his life and since, have attested to the popularity of his visual art, most recently Vision and Memory at the Pallant House Gallery, Chichester.