In Parenthesis ( David Jones)

 In Parenthesis 

 is a work of literature by David Jones first published in England in 1937. 

David Although Jones had been known solely as an engraver and painter prior to its publication, the book won the Hawthornden Prize and the admiration of writers such as W. B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot. 

 Based on Jones's own experience as an infantryman in the First World War, In Parenthesis narrates the experiences of English private John Ball in a mixed English-Welsh regiment, starting with embarkation from England and ending seven months later with the assault on Mametz Wood during the Battle of the Somme.  

The work employs a mixture of lyrical verse and prose, is highly allusive, and ranges in tone from formal to Cockney colloquial and military slang. 

The literary allusions include Shakespeare, primarily Henry V, Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Christabel, Lewis Carroll's Alice books, and The Song of Roland but they also include Malory, The Gododdin, The Mabinogion, and the sixth-century Welsh poem Preiddeu Annwn (The Harrowing of Hell).  

The principal cumulative effect of these allusions is symbolically to align the Battle of the Somme with the catastrophic (for the Welsh) defeats at Catraeth and Camlan. Far from "romanticizing" war, allusions to romance give to battle frightening archetypal force and express the combatants' preverbal intensity of emotion 

T.S. Eliot called it "a work of genius". W. H. Auden considered it "a masterpiece", "the greatest book about the First World War" that he had read, a work in which Jones did "for the British and the Germans what Homer did for the Greeks and the Trojans" in a masterpiece comparable in quality to The Divine Comedy.  

The novelist and poet Adam Thorpe says it "towers above any other prose or verse memorial of that war (indeed, of any war)". The Jones scholar Thomas Dilworth writes that it is "probably the greatest work of British Modernism written between the wars" and "the greatest work of literature in English on war". 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Parenthesis 

"Y Gododdin (Welsh: [əː ɡɔˈdɔðɪn]) is a medieval Welsh poem consisting of a series of elegies to the men of the Brittonic kingdom of Gododdin and its allies who, according to the conventional interpretation, died fighting the Angles of Deira and Bernicia at a place named Catraeth in about AD 600. It is traditionally ascribed to the bard Aneirin and survives only in one manuscript, the "Book of Aneirin".