{"id":6622,"date":"2016-07-11T10:01:57","date_gmt":"2016-07-11T09:01:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=6622"},"modified":"2016-07-12T14:57:32","modified_gmt":"2016-07-12T13:57:32","slug":"the-poems-of-basil-bunting-faber-30-reviewed-by-ian-pople","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=6622","title":{"rendered":"The Poems of Basil Bunting<\/em>, (Faber) \u00a330.00, reviewed by Ian Pople"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Poems of Basil Bunting<\/em> edited with and introduction and commentary by Don Share.<\/p>\n

In 1952, Basil Bunting visited T. S. Eliot with a view to getting Eliot to publish his Poems 1950<\/em>. This volume had been published in America by one of Pound\u2019s acolytes, Dallam Flynn, although Bunting had little involvement with the book, as much because Bunting was living in Teheran at the time.\u00a0 The book contained a strange introduction written by Flynn, part of which was an attack on John Berryman.\u00a0 Flynn was described by Pound\u2019s daughter, Mary, as \u2018mad as a hatter\u2019, and Bunting himself told Dorothy Pound that he was completely baffled by the introduction. He also told Victoria Forde that the introduction was \u2018florid, effusive as John Barrymore.\u2019 \u00a0That introduction and Bunting\u2019s refusal to withdraw it, out of loyalty to Flynn, was one reason why Faber and Faber refused to publish the book in the UK.\u00a0 Another reason was Eliot\u2019s own opinion that Bunting was too influenced by Pound and that \u2018there wasn\u2019t sufficient divergence to really justify [Bunting\u2019s] being published by them.\u2019 And Eliot rejected him again in 1960. Eliot did, also, tell Bunting that his poetry was \u2018good, some of it very good indeed, and writing [sic<\/em>] is clean and workmanlike with no fluff.\u2019 However, as Bunting\u2019s recent biographer, Richard Burton points out, Bunting had never fought shy of criticising Eliot, calling The Criterion<\/em> an \u2018international disaster\u2019.\u00a0 And Michael Schmidt has suggested that Bunting\u2019s poem \u2018Attis, or: Something missing\u2019 satirises Eliot as a eunuch.<\/p>\n

That Faber are now publishing Bunting some sixty-four years after their initial \u2018rejection\u2019, and publishing Bunting\u2019s complete oeuvre in Don Share\u2019s wonderful variorum edition is clearly to be welcomed.\u00a0 And, although Share doesn\u2019t add much to the poems we\u2019ve had for some time in the Oxford\/Bloodaxe editions, his meticulous scholarship, and excellent introduction to the publishing history of the poems, means we can now see the writing in the context of their production.\u00a0 By this, I mean the ways in which Bunting worked his poems; as, in the commentaries on the poems, Share introduces Bunting\u2019s own commentaries on the forms and functions of the poems.\u00a0 And Bunting was not shy of talking about writing; famously writing about the \u2018metric of the ear\u2019 and that \u2018poetry is sound\u2019.<\/p>\n

Which is, as they say, true \u2018up to a point, Lord Copper\u2019.\u00a0 When Bunting wrote the introduction to the Fulcrum Press Collected Poems<\/em>, he commented that he had learned from poets including Horace, and others such as the Persian poets Manuchehri and Ferdosi.\u00a0 Bunting published a number of versions of Horace, including a poem with that title.\u00a0 Bunting was a great student of prosody and would have \u2018listened\u2019 to the quantitative metre in Horace.\u00a0 That study sometimes leads his poetry up certain cul-de-sacs, as quantitative metre, the measuring of syllables in terms of length and weight, doesn\u2019t work with the prosody of contemporary English(es).\u00a0 And some of the early \u2018First Book of Odes\u2019, such as \u2018to Helen Egli\u2019 which begins \u2018Empty vast days built in the waste memory seem a jail for\/ thoughts grown stale in the mind, tardy of birth, rank and inflexible:\u2019 use patterns of long and short syllables which may seem odd and costive to the contemporary ear.\u00a0 And yet this oddness doesn\u2019t seem to affect the writing of other poets he cites in that introduction, such as Edmund Spenser, who would have been just as, or even more, familiar with these Latin metres as Bunting himself.<\/p>\n

So there is quite a lot of Bunting\u2019s writing which will strike that contemporary ear as resolutely minor.\u00a0 But what Bunting does with this \u2018sharp study and long toil\u2019 of prosody is to produce the marvellous long poems, or, as Bunting calls them, \u2018sonatas\u2019, of which the most famous is \u2018Briggflatts\u2019.\u00a0 These sonatas all contain varieties of form, from his first long poem \u2018Villon\u2019 with its burst of pseudo-ballad, to Briggflatts<\/em> which Bunting said contained \u2018an undisciplined and indiscriminate use of Cynghanedd\u2019, the Welsh prosodic form. This prosodic form is in its own way related to the alliterative forms of Anglo-Saxon prosody.<\/p>\n

What all this means is that, to state the obvious, Bunting is not an easy poet.\u00a0 His writing is dense and costive.\u00a0 It is writing which also requires its own \u2018sharp study and long toil\u2019.\u00a0 And that also implies that it might be a slightly acquired taste; a taste which varies from reader to reader.\u00a0 Roy Fisher chose \u2018The Orotava Road\u2019 for a small anthology he produced of his favourite poets. Written when Bunting was living in the Canary Islands, it is, perhaps, one of Bunting\u2019s more immediately accessible poems.\u00a0 It begins \u2018Four white heifers with sprawling hooves\/trundle the waggon.\/ Its ill-roped crates heavy with fruit sway.\/The chisel point of the goad, blue and white,\/ glitters ahead,\/ a flame to follow lance-high in a man\u2019s hand\/ who does not shave.\u2019 Don Share\u2019s notes reproduce Bunting\u2019s comments when reading the poem that it was written \u2018to see how much I could annex of Dr Carlos Williams\u2019s early technique about the year 1935.\u2019 Share also reproduces Bunting\u2019s comments on living on Tenerife, a place he hated; which is odd, considering that this warm, observant poem written in a version of Williams\u2019 stepped line, shows a writer who looked at and absorbed his surroundings in detail.\u00a0 And leads to the question of what Bunting might have done if he had chosen to write more in this mode.<\/p>\n

But Bunting is clearly a restless technician.\u00a0 Looking at the collected poems, we can see how he moves from one mode to another in the short lyrics.\u00a0 And this restlessness culminates in his masterpiece, Briggflatts<\/em>. \u00a0Share notes that, while composing the poem, \u2018he would try out a number of lines and expand these into sections of verse.\u00a0 Then he would rewrite the sections, incorporating revisions, and in some cases cancel the earlier sections.\u00a0 When a section had been finished, a new one was begun and worked on. At times, he drew scansion marks above or near certain lines.\u2019 During its composition, Bunting remarked to Roy Fisher that \u2018The music is complete; all I have to do is to make adjustments to the content.\u2019 And one of the best ways to appreciate Briggflatts<\/em> is to listen to one of the recordings Bunting made of it, in his gruff Northumbrian tones.<\/p>\n

Briggflatts<\/em> consists of five sections ranging over episodes from Bunting\u2019s \u2018autobiography\u2019, but don\u2019t go looking to this work for confession.\u00a0 Bunting is too elusive, and allusive, a poet to offer easy revelation.\u00a0 Even the first section, with its recall of a childhood love affair, places childhood sexuality within a context which includes the killing of the Norse king, Bloodaxe, the work of the girl\u2019s father, a stone mason, and landscape of the Northumbrian fells.\u00a0 The poem goes on to describe an existence on the edges of Grub Street London, a kind of \u2018exile\u2019 in Italy, the journey of Alexander the Great across the then Persia to meet the Angel, Israfel, at the top of the mountains of Gog and Magog, via the Welsh bards Aneurin and Taliesin, to include the sheepdog trainers of Newcastle.\u00a0 And the poem \u2018ends\u2019 with a sense of nostalgic regret for what might have been.\u00a0 Into all of this, Bunting threads allusions to Byrd, Scarlatti and Monteverdi and Schoenberg.\u00a0 It is a poem which received very mixed reviews on publication.\u00a0 The big reviews in the Observer<\/em>, Guardian<\/em> and TLS<\/em> were uniformly sniffy; its publication came at a time when Larkin held much sway in British poetry.\u00a0 But those whose tolerance of Poundian modernism was greater, such as Cyril Connolly in the Sunday Times<\/em>, called it \u2018one of the best poems I have read and re-read for a long time.\u2019\u00a0 This collection of Bunting\u2019s poetry and Don Share\u2019s meticulous editing of them will keep us reading and re-reading the poems for a very long time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Poems of Basil Bunting edited with and introduction and commentary by Don Share. In 1952, Basil Bunting visited T. S. Eliot with a view to getting Eliot to publish his Poems 1950. This volume had been published in America by one of Pound\u2019s acolytes, Dallam Flynn, although Bunting had little involvement with the book, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":21,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":[]},"categories":[13,283],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe Poems of Basil Bunting, (Faber) \u00a330.00, reviewed by Ian Pople - The Manchester Review<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=6622\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Poems of Basil Bunting, (Faber) \u00a330.00, reviewed by Ian Pople - The Manchester Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The Poems of Basil Bunting edited with and introduction and commentary by Don Share. 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