Abstract
Basil Bunting’s major poem Briggflatts (1966)1 was published in a cultural world still dominated by the Movement poets, despite A. Alvarez’s challenging anthology The New Poets of 1962. Quite apart from its prioritisation of verbal music over positivistic sentiment and its ‘Lindisfarne’2 intricacy of patterning, the poem broke away from the consensus that the short lyric was the vehicle of contemporary poetics. Briggflatts is, like The Waste Land, a shrunken epic — though one as personalised as The Prelude. Influenced by Ezra Pound in particular,3 the poem could be characterised as neo-modernist — resistant to the current recycling of Georgian tropes and Augustan empiricism4 alike, while not attracted to the exciting excesses of postmodern verse as would be exemplified in Ted Hughes’s Crow (1970). The poem exemplifies the quality verse can achieve if group-fashion is eschewed and the craftsman sticks to his toil. Though in thrall to a mythologised history, it also speaks to the environmental concern of the 1990s: its preoccupation with the spirit of place also communicates what Mikhail Bakhtin has called ‘Great Time’, where the ‘chronotope’ of many centuries finds particular articulation and ‘every meaning’ has its ‘homecoming festival’.5
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Notes
All quotations from Basil Bunting, Collected Poems (London: Fulcrum Press, 1970).
Much is made of the influence of the Lindisfarne Gospels in Peter Makin, Bunting: The Shaping of His Verse (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992).
However, he was influenced by other modern poets too. See Michael Schmidt, A Reader’s Guide to Fifty Modern British Poets (London: Heinemann, 1979), p. 194. In the early 1970s Bunting recounted to myself and some colleagues from the University of Victoria, Canada, how he once applied for a Guggenheim Fellowship with W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot as referees: he did not attain one. Diana Collecott, Co-director of the Basil Bunting Poetry Centre at Durham University, has confirmed the anecdote — apparently Pound did not send a reference.
As in the Movement. See Blake Morrison, The Movement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980).
See M. M. Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, translated by Vern W. McGee, eds Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin, Tex.: University of Texas Press, 1986), p. 170.
David Jones, The Anathemata: Fragments of an Attempted Writing (London: Faber, 1972).
David Blamires, David Jones: Artist and Writer (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1978), p. 431.
Quoted in Humphrey Carpenter, A Serious Character: The Life of Ezra Pound (London: Faber, 1988), p. 431. For a highly informative account of Bunting’s earlier poems
see Eric Mottram’s essay ‘“An Acknowledged Land”: Love and Poetry in Bunting’s Sonatas’ in the Basil Bunting Special Issue, Poetry Information, Vol. 19, Autumn 1978, pp. 11–29.
See Ezra Pound, Selected Prose 1909–1965, ed. William Cookson (London: Faber, 1978), p. 236.
‘As regarding rhythm: to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in the sequence of a metronone’, from ‘A Retrospect’, Ezra Pound, Literary Essays, ed. T.S. Eliot (London: Faber, 1968), p. 3.
Edward Lucie-Smith, Contemporary Poets of the English Language (London: Saint James Press, 1970), p. 162.
‘The mother’s body is therefore what mediates the symbolic law organizing social relations and becomes the ordering principle of the semiotic chora…’ The whole essay ‘Revolution in Poetic Language’ should be read for a full understanding of this term. The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986) p. 95.
See Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London: Methuen, 1982)
and Ruth Finnegan, Oral Poetry: Its Nature, Significance and Social Context (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977).
Quoted in Hugh Kenner, A Sinking Island: The Modern English Writers (London: Barrie & Jenkins, 1986), p. 257.
I mean that in the sense of Marshall McLuhan in The Gutenberg Galaxy (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1967).
I mean this also in the expanded sense of Richard Rorty in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
Linda Hutcheon’s somewhat ungainly, if well worked-out, phrase in A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (London, Rout-ledge, 1988).
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Brown, D. (1997). Basil Bunting: Briggflatts. In: Day, G., Docherty, B. (eds) British Poetry from the 1950s to the 1990s. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-25566-5_2
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