[New-Poetry] Basil Bunting

[Skip Fox]

Barbara Lesch's 1979 diss. (made into a book?) is very good on Bunting.
Providing a base for a solid reading.  I've not kept up with the
scholarship, but it's my understanding that in the last 20 years he's
received a lot more attention.

 

For me, he's one of the central British/Irish poets along with Yeats, Auden,
Thomas, Prince, & Hughes. Small corpus, but then they say he was a "master
of fireplace and poker" (used to burn a lot of mss.).

 

 

 

-----Original Message-----
From: new-poetry-bounces at wiz.cath.vt.edu
[mailto:new-poetry-bounces at wiz.cath.vt.edu] On Behalf Of Jeff Newberry
Sent: Monday, February 02, 2009 10:11 AM
To: NewPoetry
Subject: [New-Poetry] Basil Bunting

 

I've been reading Keith Tuma's By Obstinate Isles:  Modern and Postmodern
British Poetry and American Readers and his Anthology of Twentieth-Century
British & Irish Poetry for my comprehensive examinations.

I wanted to start a conversation about a few poets that I've been reading,
poets who've not been on my radar until I started reading for my exams.  So,
forgive me if some of my questions of observations seem elementary or
self-evident.

By far, one of the most fascinating poets I've come across is Basil Bunting,
a name I'd never heard, despite my undergraduate and graduate years as an
English major.  I like Briggflats quite a lot, though I'm still grappling
with the poem.  Bunting's lines with their heavy stresses and Anglo-saxon
vocabulary remind me of Pound's translation of "The Seafarer."  The poem
itself is a Modernist epic (I think), so I think of Eliot and Pound
immediately.  

But Bunting's concern with a particular place contrasts with Eliot's more
"universal" (not quite the right word, I know--maybe "far-reaching?")
concerns.  Bunting seems concerned primarily with this place (his place?):
Northumbria.  The poem burrows down into the landscape, carving itself into
the land, not unlike the mason carving stone in the poem's opening lines.
Despite his concern with landscape, however, Bunting can't help bringing in
a dose of mythology in a later part of the poem.  Indeed, the poem moves
through seasons, cyclically, depending primarily on recieved notions--such
as Spring being a time of rebirth and so on.

So, I'm wondering, what are your thoughts on Bunting?  And why on earth is
he so ignored?  He doesn't appear (a colleague tells me--I've not checked)
in the Norton Anthology of British Literature.  Perhaps he's not ignored;
perhaps I've just missed him.  Nonetheless, I thought I'd try to open up a
conversation about a poet who really has my ear right now.

Best,
Jeff Newberry

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