Comments on: A Note on Christian Wiman’s Reading of Basil Bunting

By: Don Share

Don Share — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 01:11:08 +0000

Steve says, "There should be more Bunting everywhere." Well, there will be soon!!! Meanwhile, another book to look at if you can find it is The Star You Steer By: Basil Bunting and British Modernism, ed. by James McGonigal and Richard Price. The NPF tome is Basil Bunting, Man and Poet, a lovely book, indeed. A few bones have been picked over Alldritt's book, but it's a fun read. Peter Makin's book is Bunting: The Shaping of His Verse, excellent and nicely detailed. Davie can be read on BB in the essay collection, Under Briggflatts: A History of Poetry in Great Britain 1960-1988, a very interesting book -- and classic Davies, too. And anything Peter Quartermain has written about Bunting is of great value. I'm hoping the forthcoming book will kickstart a BB revival, though really, he's never been far away.

By: Steve

Steve — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 23:45:02 +0000

Don, is your Bunting edition out yet?
Another good book on Bunting is the biography by Keith Alldritt, The Poet as Spy. After reading it I can say that I trust Bunting on almost everything (except perhaps the age of consent). Victoria Forde’s own book is useful but not as good as the Makin study. There aren’t many others, or not yet. Lots of essays, though, many of which are collected in a National Poetry Foundation tome. Donald Davie wrote well and admiringly about Bunting several times, and Cyril Connolly, believe it or not, admired and understood Briggflatts and said so in print.
The preface Don quotes above also includes the memorable sentence “A man who puts together his Collected Poems screws together the boards of his coffin.”
There should be more Bunting everywhere.

By: Ange

Ange — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 21:49:51 +0000

I love these quotes. Temperamentally, at least, I feel close to them. Do you agree with Chris that the best book on Bunting is Peter Makin’s Bunting: The Shaping of His Verse? Are there others?
Oh I read Bunting for sense as well as sound too! The extravagance of his regret in “Briggflatts” may seem like a contrivance to some, but where would poetry be without excesses?

By: Don Share

Don Share — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 15:18:15 +0000

About Bunting “at the level of music,” he was influenced by such things as Byrd’s music, heard when he was very young, and he actually wrote a music column in the 1920s; later on, in talking about composing poems he called “Sonatas” (e.g., “Briggflatts”) he said:
“I had some knowledge of music and I had arrived via a somewhat strange route at the conclusion that poetry should try to take over some of the techniques that I only knew in music. So that when I discovered Eliot writing poems and calling them ‘Preludes’, even though the resemblance, to say, Chopin’s Preludes was slight and superficial, I was extremely interested.”
Late in his life (1972) he wrote, in a letter to Victoria Forde:
“Music has suggested certain forms and certain details to me, but I have not tried to be consistent about it. Rather, I’ve felt the spirit of a form, or of a procedure, without trying to reproduce it in any way that could be demonstrated on a blackboard. (There’s no one-one relationship between my movements and any of Scarlatti’s). You could say the same about the detail of sound. Eliot—and Kipling—show prodigious skill in fitting words to a prearranged pattern, very admirable: yet they don’t do it without losing some suppleness…. Critical notions are in control from the outside so that the poem is constrained to fit them, as though it had never been conceived in the form it wears… My matter is born of the form—-or the form of the matter, if you care to think that I just conceive things musically. There’s no fitting, at least consciously. Whatever you think I am saying is something I could not have said in any other way.”
Introducing his collected poems, he summed it up this way: “With sleights learned from others and an ear open to melodic analogies I have set down words as a musician pricks his score, not to be read in silence, but to trace in the air a pattern of sound that may sometimes, I hope, be pleasing.”
All that said, I think I trust Bunting at the level of subject matter, as well… but that’s another story!