Anglophone literary modernism, famously, has often had very little to do with English writers. The brahmins in the traditional account—Ezra Pound, James Joyce and T. S. Eliot—were all non-English in origin, for all the strenuous Anglophilia of Eliot’s later years. More recently, the Anglo-American academy has tended to journey to the postcolonial margins in its quest for liberal pluralism—or, if you prefer, neo-Gladstonian munificence. Caught in the gap between these two tendencies, the English modernist poet Basil Bunting (1900–85) has not received as much attention as might have been expected for a writer with his avant-garde credentials. An adherent of Pound and Eliot who began as a politically radical, experimentalist poet of the twenties and thirties, and ended as an unlikely counter-cultural hero of the sixties and seventies, Bunting has been mentioned less and less in recent critical debates in the field. This in spite of his former centrality to the international poetry scene—among his many devotees in later life were Robert Creeley, Hugh Kenner, Thom Gunn and Allen Ginsberg—and the fact that his masterpiece of 1966, the verse autobiography Briggflatts, is surely the most substantial English-language poem of the late-modernist period.
The question of Bunting’s maverick status in modern verse is the central narrative of Richard Burton’s impressively weighty A Strong Song Tows Us—its title taken from a line in Briggflatts—which is the first biography of the poet that can fairly claim to be definitive; both Basil Bunting: A Northern Life (1997) by Richard Caddel and Anthony Flowers, and Basil Bunting: The Poet as Spy (1998) by Keith Alldritt are cursory sketches rather than fully realized portraits. In Bunting’s early years, Burton uncovers much that is suggestive of a writer congenitally at odds with the high-bourgeois English culture he would later use as a point of antithesis. Though born into relative suburban affluence, Bunting was raised against the backdrop of industrial Newcastle-upon-Tyne, and schooled in an environment at far remove from the pastoral Anglicanism that was and remains the locus classicus of so much English literature. His father was a Fabian doctor with close professional ties to the industrial mining culture of the English north-east; moreover, while he does not seem to have been a practising member of the Religious Society of Friends, he sent his son to Quaker schools in Yorkshire and Berkshire. Burton maintains that Bunting’s Quakerism was half genuine, half a pose. But it seems clear that these early experiences fostered an attitude of politico-religious recalcitrance that would play a key role in ensuing years. Called up when he left school in the last months of World War I, Bunting took his radical Quaker stand as a conscientious objector and was rewarded with the better part of a year in jail. His treatment there was, by all accounts, brutal; Bunting was usually taciturn on the subject, but his friend Denis Goacher would later relate that ‘the experience embittered Basil for life. He said it coloured all he thought about England, about the Establishment’.
Following his release from Winchester Prison in the summer of 1919, Bunting enrolled at the London School of Economics, encouraged perhaps by its Fabian patrimony. Among his contemporaries there was a young Lionel Robbins, who seems to have ushered Bunting toward the leading lights of high modernism at a crucial moment. As he would later inform Pound:
I met Robbins just before I went to lse and did him the bad turn of persuading him to go there too. Tastes more or less better class Bloomsbury—i.e., aware of a lot of things you might not expect a prof of economics to have heard of. First person, I think, to show me any of Eliot’s work, certainly first to show me bit of Ulysses in The Egoist (or was it Portrait of J.J.)? He used to like your works and probably still does.
Distracted by Robbins’s reading recommendations—Pound’s Homage to Sextus Propertius and Eliot’s ‘Preludes’ were of particular interest—Bunting left university after four years without taking a degree, having set his sights on a career in writing. His poetic juvenilia had been, by his own admission, ‘no good’. But the discovery of Pound and Eliot inspired him to look beyond the poetic climate of twenties London, where the mannerly nostalgia of the Georgian poets held sway until it was gently supplanted by the formal gradualism of W. H. Auden and his circle at the decade’s close. Decamping to Paris in 1923, Bunting found employment at Ford Madox Ford’s transatlantic review, and it was during his tenure here that a lifelong friendship with Pound was begun, after a chance encounter in a Montparnasse café.
Bunting soon became a prominent member of what the publisher James Laughlin called the ‘Ezuversity’, the circle of poets, artists and musicians who gathered intermittently around Pound in the exiles’ idyll of Rapallo on the Ligurian coast in the twenties and thirties. This was the making of him creatively. In the company of Pound, Yeats, George Antheil, and younger poets such as the American Marxist Louis Zukofsky, he was given a point of entry into the interwar avant-garde, and for a while he relished the opportunity. He helped Pound with preparations for a seminal series of concerts at the Teatro Reale in Rapallo, began a major translation of the Persian epic Shahnameh, became peripherally involved in the ‘Objectivist’ verse movement spearheaded by Zukofsky and William Carlos Williams, and unfurled a sizeable body of work, most of which appeared as the lead contribution to Pound’s Active Anthology of 1933. In his own laconic summary: ‘it was a very pleasant time. I got a lot of poetry written, enjoyed the conversation, enjoyed sailing my boat, enjoyed the sunshine. I saw a good deal of Yeats’.
According to Yeats, the young poet was ‘one of Ezra’s more savage disciples’, and indeed there was more urgency to the Rapallo excursion than is suggested in Bunting’s account. But for now the disputations were aesthetic rather than political. When he wasn’t sailing his boat in the Tigullio Gulf, Bunting channelled his disdain for the English establishment into a determined onslaught on its literary traditions, a campaign that mixed puritanical modernist zeal with acerbic Geordie humour. He wrote to American editor Harriet Monroe in July 1931 to say that he was embarking on a project of ‘editing’ Shakespeare’s sonnets by removing apparently superfluous words, simplifying the syntax, sometimes deleting entire poems from the sequence—‘after sufficient cutting and straightening out of inversions, rather a nice poem should emerge’. The formal critique of English literature was elaborated in ‘The Lion and the Lizard’, a prose piece of the period: