Cyclical History and Roman Decline

Abstract

Chapter 4 examines how Jones’s emerging philosophy of history was shaped by the cyclical historical movement which rose to prominence in the early twentieth century. Contextualising his rejection of linear progress and his belief in the fundamental similarity of cycles occurring across world history—particularly between Roman and Western decline—demonstrates the impact of this movement on Jones’s thought and art. Out of this engagement, and through his dependence on the works of Oswald Spengler and Christopher Dawson, Jones would come to reimagine time as a dynamic relationship between past and present. This chapter charts Jones’s reliance on cyclical methodologies and compares his approach to those of his literary contemporaries. It examines the complex vision of history that emerges in his poetry, in which cyclical concepts (such as, typological repetition and patterns of civilisational rise and decline) are subsumed within an ongoing teleological movement towards the end of time.