The Forms of the Late Civilisational Phase

Abstract

Chapter 5 examines how the works of Christopher Dawson and Oswald Spengler shaped the vision of civilisational decline Jones developed across his poetry. Tracing the ways in which he drew upon their language, concepts, and even characters and embedded these into his Roman fragments and historical essays, elucidates the constructive dialogue Jones maintained with their works in his investigation of Roman and Western decline. This chapter pursues a contextualised close reading of Jones’s poetic representation of the late phase of civilisation, as a megalopolitan capitalist technocracy which ends in the brutality of Caesarian dictatorship and the decay of culture and religion. While Spengler encouraged his readers to embrace this totalitarian end, Jones and Dawson used their works to fight against the decline of the West. What emerges from Jones’s explorations is a belief in the creative potential of man-the-artist to reject standardisation and mechanisation, and to revivify culture in modernity.