The Poetry of Basil Bunting

Basil Bunting did not 'believe in biography'. He used to assert that his great poem Briggflatts was his autobiography, and that nothing else was worth saying. He had scant respect for critics, and gave little away about his life--or misled his would-be biographers, whose accounts of him were often semi-mythical. But Bunting's real life does read like an adventure story. Born in Northumberland in 1900, he lived in Paris in the twenties, where Ezra Pound rescued him from jail and fixed him up with a job on the Transatlantic Review. In 1923 he followed Pound to Italy--giving up his job to Hemingway--where Yeats knew him as 'one of Pound's more savage disciples'. For the next thirty years he led a sometimes wild and always varied life, in Italy, England, Berlin, Tenerife, America and Persia, as a struggling, penniless writer, a music critic, sea captain, RAF officer, Times correspondent and Chief of Political Intelligence in Teheran. During these years he built up a reputation in America as the best English poet of his generation, at the same time as his poetry was neglected in Britain. It was not until the publication of Briggflatts in 1966 that his genius was finally recognised. He was in his seventies when he first met the American critic Sister Victoria Forde, who was working on a study of music and meaning in his poetry. They continued to meet and correspond, and his comments and answers to her letters now form an integral part of the book which grew out of her academic research. This is the first critical study of Bunting's poetry. It is a brilliantly researched book drawing upon the work and letters of Bunting and his contemporaries, as well as interviews and correspondence with his family, and includes over thirty previously unpublished photographs of and by Bunting taken throughout his life.