In 1979, Donald Davie wrote that ‘Briggflatts is where English poetry has got to, it is what English poets must assimilate and go on from.’ Why hasn’t that happened?
One reason for the critical occlusion of Bunting is that late-modernism itself can be a bit of a cul-de-sac. On the DVD that accompanies the text, Bunting lists the figures that had supported him in his time. That list included the greatest figures of late-modernism; including, Pound, Yeats, David Jones and Hugh MacDiarmid, but not Eliot, who, in 1951, had turned Bunting’s poetry down. The last two in Bunting’s list tended to work on an epic scale and within that created their own dialects, and this is Bunting’s practice in Briggflatts; where as he puts it, ‘Southrons would maul the music of Briggflatts’.
In addition, the figures on the British scene that Bunting’s work has really marked are few and far between. The poets from the North-East of England include a group who knew Bunting personally: Ric Caddel, Tom Pickard and Barry MacSweeney. But only one poet has attempted to replicate Bunting’s music and scale, and that is the criminally undervalued, if rather profligate, Colin Simms. Bunting has admirers in the U.S., including Christian Wiman, Denis Johnstone and August Kleinzahler, but, again, their music and forms are very different from Bunting’s.
The bibliography that is also part of this book also suggests that the steam has gone out of Bunting studies. Of the forty-four items listed only three critical studies have been produced on Bunting in the twenty-first century. Of these three, the best is Christian Wiman’s reassessment of Bunting in The New Criterion which elegantly and clearly puts the case for the difficulties that Bunting presents and also gives clear reasons why we should read him – and listen to the somewhat mannered reading of Briggflatts on the CD that’s also included in this new edition.
One reason is the sheer technical brilliance that Bunting brought to verse writing. He was familiar with the older forms of British verse form including the Welsh cynghanedd, and Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse both of which are present in Briggflatts. Alongside this, in recreating a Northumbrian flavour to the writing, Bunting had an impacted and sometimes costive vocabulary and syntax. As Wiman puts it, ‘the lines seem almost to bristle with contempt for anything extraneous or merely ornamental.’
Bunting needed the impacted nature of the surface of the writing because of his own emphasis on ‘things’. And this was not a blind empiricism. If the modernists teach contemporary writers anything, it is the importance of looking, and Bunting was no exception to that. As a result of the steadiness of his gaze, Bunting could also be intensely moving. Briggflatts is an intensely emotional piece and yet it is an emotion bounded by the real, gripped tightly in landscape and detail, though Wiman feels that this can be a bit ‘worked up’, in both senses of the phrase.
This is a slightly woozy edition of this great poem: its bibliography seems aimed at an academic audience, whereas the DVD is a rather reverential Arts biog from the eighties. It shows Bunting brewing tea, lighting up his untipped Players, pontificating, in the way he was often wont to do, on the relation of poetry to dance, or self-consciously walking roadside verges. The book also contains a fine potted biography of Bunting, some of Bunting’s own comments on the poem, and a dense introduction to the provenance of the text. All this means that this classic modernist poem is presented in a rich environment, and that there is no excuse for its not being on any serious reader’s book shelf.
Ian Pople