Basil Bunting

Basil Cheesman Bunting (3 March 1900 – 17 April 1985) was a British modernist poet. He had a lifelong interest in music that led him to emphasise the sonic qualities of poetry, particularly the importance of reading poetry aloud. He was an accomplished reader of his own work.

Born into a Quaker family in Scotswood-on-Tyne, Northumberland (now part of Newcastle upon Tyne), Bunting was educated at the Royal Grammar School there for two years. He then studied at two Quaker schools: from 1912–1916 at Ackworth School in Yorkshire and from 1916–1918 at Leighton Park School in Berkshire.cite web
last = Pursglove
first = Glyn
date = 2002-03-21
url = http://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=639
title = Basil Bunting
work = The Literary Encyclopedia
publisher = The Literary Dictionary Company
accessdate = 2006-05-07] . His Quaker education strongly influenced his pacifist opposition to World War I, and in 1918 he was arrested as a conscientious objector, serving a sentence of more than a year in Wormwood Scrubs and Winchester prisons. cite web|
last = Myers
first = Alan
year = 2004
url = http://online.northumbria.ac.uk/faculties/art/humanities/cns/m-bunting.html
title = Basil Bunting (1900–1985)
work = Myers Literary Guide to North-East England
publisher = Centre for Northern Studies
accessdate = 2006-05-07] These events were to have an important role in his first major poem, "Villon" (1925). "Villon" was one of a rather rare set of complexly structured poems that Bunting labelled "sonatas," thus underlining the sonic qualities of his verse and recalling his love of music. After his release from prison in 1920, traumatized by the time spent in jail, Bunting went to London, where he enrolled in the London School of Economics, and had his first contacts with journalists, social activists and Bohemia. Tradition has it that it was Nina Hamnett who introduced him to the works of Ezra Pound by lending him a copy of "Homage to Sextus Propertius". The glamour of the cosmopolitan modernist examples of Nina Hamnett and Mina Loy seems to have influenced Bunting in his later move from London to Paris.

After having travelled in Northern Europe while holding small secretarial jobs in London, Bunting left the London School of Economics without a degree and went to France. There, in 1923, he became friendly with Ezra Pound, who years later would dedicate his "Guide to Kulchur" (1938) to both Bunting and Louis Zukofsky, "strugglers in the desert". Bunting's poetry began to show the influence of this friendship. He visited Pound in Rapallo, Italy, and later settled there with his family from 1931 to 1933. He was published in the Objectivist issue of "Poetry" magazine, in the "Objectivist Anthology", and in Pound's "Active Anthology". He also worked as a music critic during this time.

During World War II, Bunting served in British Military Intelligence in Persia. After the war, he continued to serve on the British Embassy staff in Tehran until he was expelled by Muhammad Mussadegh in 1952.

Back in Newcastle, he worked as a journalist on the "Evening Chronicle" until his rediscovery during the 1960s by young poets, notably Tom Pickard, who were interested in working in the modernist tradition. In 1966, he published his major long poem, "Briggflatts", named for the Quaker meeting house in Cumbria where he is now buried. Divided into five parts, "Briggflatts" is a kind of poetic autobiography, looking back on teenage love and on Bunting's involvement in the high modernist period. In addition, "Briggflatts" can be read as a meditation on the limits of life and a celebration of Northumbrian culture and dialect, as symbolised by events and figures like the doomed Viking King Eric Bloodaxe. The critic Cyril Connolly was among the first to recognise the poem's value, describing it as "the finest long poem to have been published in England since T. S. Eliot's "Four Quartets".

Portrait bust of Basil Bunting

Basil Bunting sat in Northumberland for sculptor Alan Thornhill with a resulting terracotta [ [http://alanthornhill.co.uk/sm_005.htm portrait head of Basil Bunting in clay for bronze] image of sculpture by Alan Thornhill who travelled to Northumberland for Bunting's sitting] (for bronze) in existence. The correspondence file relating to the Bunting portrait bust is held as part of the Thornhill Papers (2006:56) in the archive [http://www.henry-moore-fdn.co.uk/matrix_engine/content.php?page_id=584 HMI Archive] of the Henry Moore Foundation's Henry Moore Institute in Leeds and the terracotta remains in the collection of the artist.

References

* Alldritt, Keith, "The Poet As Spy: The Life and Wild Times of Basil Bunting" Aurum Press, London, 1998, ISBN 9781854104779.
* Makin, Peter (editor) "Basil Bunting on Poetry", Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1999. ISBN 9780801861666.

Footnotes

External links

* [http://www.dur.ac.uk/basil-bunting-poetry.centre/ Basil Bunting Poetry Centre]
* [http://www.poetsgraves.co.uk/bunting.htm Basil Bunting's Grave]
* [http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/bunting/ Basil Bunting Home Page at EPC, Buffalo]
* [http://jacketmagazine.com/10/bunt-brig.html At Briggflatts Meetinghouse] recording read by the author
* [http://jacketmagazine.com/10/cadd-bunt.html Minor Poet, Not Conspicuously Dishonest] Richard Caddel's Introduction to "Complete Poems"
* [http://jacketmagazine.com/12/bunt-bak.html Review of "Complete Poems"]