Briggflatts by Basil Bunting
Bloodaxe Books, £12
It took Basil Bunting a long time to get noticed; but then, very quickly, he was forgotten again. Bunting was hailed by Ezra Pound and Louis Zukofsky in the 1930s as a significant poet in the Modernist movement but it was not until the publication of Briggflatts, in the mid-1960s, that he was recognised here in Britain. Cyril Connolly described Briggflatts as “the finest long poem to have been published in England since TS Eliot’s Four Quartets” and Hugh MacDiarmid wrote that Bunting’s poems “are the most important which have appeared in any form of the English language since TS Eliot’s The Waste Land” but, by the time he died in 1985, he had once again fallen out of fashion and out of favour.
Bunting was born in Scotswood, Newcastle-on-Tyne, in 1900 and grew up immersed in the vibrant oral traditions – of spoken poetry and sung ballads – of the north-east of England. He went to a Quaker school and, as a pacifist, refused to fight in the Great War. He spent a year in prison, first at Fenham Barracks and then at Wormwood Scrubs, before travelling to Paris where he worked as a road digger, barman and artist’s model and where, in 1923, he met Ezra Pound. He followed Pound to Rapallo in Italy – giving up his job to Ernest Hemingway – where in 1925 he wrote his first major poem, Villon, which was admired by Eliot and Pound but ignored by everyone else. In fact, for the next 40 years, his work was published only in magazines and by small presses.
Although Bunting was described by WB Yeats in 1929 as “one of Pound’s more savage disciples” and is said to have cheerfully played chess on Tenerife in 1936 with General Franco, then General Commandant of the Canaries, he began to distance himself from Pound when the American’s extraordinary political views became “increasingly maniacally fascist” and Bunting served as an intelligence officer in the RAF during the Second World War.
After the war, he worked for The Times, and British intelligence, in Tehran but was expelled by Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadeq in 1952. He returned to Britain to work as a sub-editor on The Journal and its sister paper the Evening Chronicle in Newcastle.
It was on the train every day from Wylam to Newcastle that he filled notebooks with the material which would, over the course of a year, become Briggflatts. As Neil Astley, the founder and editor of Bloodaxe Books and a long-time advocate of Bunting’s work, says: “It is a complex work. Its structural models include Scarlatti sonatas and the latticework of the Lindisfarne Gospels.”
Bunting gave the first public reading of Briggflatts at Morden Tower, Newcastle, in December 1965. It was first published in the American magazine Poetry in January 1966 and in book form by Fulcrum Press in February 1966. Bunting called Briggflatts “an autobiography”, although it isn’t really that. But it is an extraordinary poem – a lament, among other things, for lost love – and an extraordinary achievement.
Irritated by some of the glosses given to his poem, Bunting wrote: “Briggflatts is a poem: it needs no explanation. The sound of the words spoken aloud is itself the meaning, just as the sound of the notes played on the proper instruments is the meaning of any piece of music.”
He argued “poetry is seeking to make not meaning, but beauty” but conceded: “Commonplaces provide the poem’s structure: spring, summer, autumn, winter of the year and of a man’s life, interrupted in the middle and balanced around Alexander’s trip to the limits of the world and its futility, and sealed and signed at the end by a confession of our ignorance.” And he concluded: “Let the incidents and images take care of themselves.”
As well as the 720 line poem itself, this new edition includes A Note on Briggflatts written by Bunting and published posthumously in 1989; his essay The Poet’s Point of View from 1966; his preface from the Collected Poems published by Fulcrum Press in 1968; Richard Caddel’s introduction to the Bloodaxe Books edition of the Complete Poems in 2000; a biographical sketch by Neil Astley; a short essay by Don Share; a selected bibliography of 56 books and magazines with articles on the poet and his poetry; and a glossary for those, as Bunting says, “who may not know how much Northumberland differs from the Saxon south of England. Southrons would maul the music of many lines in Briggflatts.”
It also includes, tucked into a plastic envelope on the inside back cover, a CD of Bunting – who famously wrote “Poetry, like music, is to be heard” – reading Briggflatts at a studio in Southampton Row, London, in 1967 and originally released by Stream Records in 1968 (and made available on cassette by Keele University in 1988); and a DVD of Peter Bell’s film Basil Bunting: An Introduction to the Work of a Poet first shown on Channel 4 in 1982. All in all, you get a lot for your £12. The spuggies (little sparrows) are well and truly fledged again…l
Keith Richmond
It took Basil Bunting a long time to get noticed; but then, very quickly, he was forgotten again. Bunting was hailed by Ezra Pound and Louis Zukofsky in the 1930s as a significant poet in the Modernist movement but it was not until the publication of Briggflatts, in the mid-1960s, that he was recognised here in Britain. Cyril Connolly described Briggflatts as “the finest long poem to have been published in England since TS Eliot’s Four Quartets” and Hugh MacDiarmid wrote that Bunting’s poems “are the most important which have appeared in any form of the English language since TS Eliot’s The Waste Land” but, by the time he died in 1985, he had once again fallen out of fashion and out of favour.
Bunting was born in Scotswood, Newcastle-on-Tyne, in 1900 and grew up immersed in the vibrant oral traditions – of spoken poetry and sung ballads – of the north-east of England. He went to a Quaker school and, as a pacifist, refused to fight in the Great War. He spent a year in prison, first at Fenham Barracks and then at Wormwood Scrubs, before travelling to Paris where he worked as a road digger, barman and artist’s model and where, in 1923, he met Ezra Pound. He followed Pound to Rapallo in Italy – giving up his job to Ernest Hemingway – where in 1925 he wrote his first major poem, Villon, which was admired by Eliot and Pound but ignored by everyone else. In fact, for the next 40 years, his work was published only in magazines and by small presses.
Although Bunting was described by WB Yeats in 1929 as “one of Pound’s more savage disciples” and is said to have cheerfully played chess on Tenerife in 1936 with General Franco, then General Commandant of the Canaries, he began to distance himself from Pound when the American’s extraordinary political views became “increasingly maniacally fascist” and Bunting served as an intelligence officer in the RAF during the Second World War.
After the war, he worked for The Times, and British intelligence, in Tehran but was expelled by Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadeq in 1952. He returned to Britain to work as a sub-editor on The Journal and its sister paper the Evening Chronicle in Newcastle.
It was on the train every day from Wylam to Newcastle that he filled notebooks with the material which would, over the course of a year, become Briggflatts. As Neil Astley, the founder and editor of Bloodaxe Books and a long-time advocate of Bunting’s work, says: “It is a complex work. Its structural models include Scarlatti sonatas and the latticework of the Lindisfarne Gospels.”
Bunting gave the first public reading of Briggflatts at Morden Tower, Newcastle, in December 1965. It was first published in the American magazine Poetry in January 1966 and in book form by Fulcrum Press in February 1966. Bunting called Briggflatts “an autobiography”, although it isn’t really that. But it is an extraordinary poem – a lament, among other things, for lost love – and an extraordinary achievement.
Irritated by some of the glosses given to his poem, Bunting wrote: “Briggflatts is a poem: it needs no explanation. The sound of the words spoken aloud is itself the meaning, just as the sound of the notes played on the proper instruments is the meaning of any piece of music.”
He argued “poetry is seeking to make not meaning, but beauty” but conceded: “Commonplaces provide the poem’s structure: spring, summer, autumn, winter of the year and of a man’s life, interrupted in the middle and balanced around Alexander’s trip to the limits of the world and its futility, and sealed and signed at the end by a confession of our ignorance.” And he concluded: “Let the incidents and images take care of themselves.”
As well as the 720 line poem itself, this new edition includes A Note on Briggflatts written by Bunting and published posthumously in 1989; his essay The Poet’s Point of View from 1966; his preface from the Collected Poems published by Fulcrum Press in 1968; Richard Caddel’s introduction to the Bloodaxe Books edition of the Complete Poems in 2000; a biographical sketch by Neil Astley; a short essay by Don Share; a selected bibliography of 56 books and magazines with articles on the poet and his poetry; and a glossary for those, as Bunting says, “who may not know how much Northumberland differs from the Saxon south of England. Southrons would maul the music of many lines in Briggflatts.”
It also includes, tucked into a plastic envelope on the inside back cover, a CD of Bunting – who famously wrote “Poetry, like music, is to be heard” – reading Briggflatts at a studio in Southampton Row, London, in 1967 and originally released by Stream Records in 1968 (and made available on cassette by Keele University in 1988); and a DVD of Peter Bell’s film Basil Bunting: An Introduction to the Work of a Poet first shown on Channel 4 in 1982. All in all, you get a lot for your £12. The spuggies (little sparrows) are well and truly fledged again…
Keith Richmond
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