Basil Bunting
From Free net encyclopedia
Basil Bunting (March 3, 1900 – 1985) was a British modernist poet. He had a lifelong interest in music and this led him to emphasise the idea of poetry as sound and the importance of reading poetry aloud. Bunting was an accomplished reader of his own work.
Bunting was born in Scotswood-on-Tyne, Northumberland, now part of Newcastle upon Tyne and educated as a Quaker. In 1918, he was arrested as a conscientious objector and spent time in Wormwood Scrubs and Winchester prisons.
During the early 1920s, he became friendly with Ezra Pound who dedicated his Guide to Kulchur to Bunting and Louis Zukofsky, and his early poetry was to show the influence of this friendship. He was published in the Objectivist issue of Poetry magazine and the Objectivist Anthology and in Pound's Active Anthology. He also worked as a music critic during this time.
During World War II, Bunting served in British Military Intelligence in Persia. After the war, he continued to serve on the British Embassy staff in Teheran until he was expelled by Muhammad Mussadegh in 1952.
Back in Newcastle, he worked as a journalist on the Evening Chronicle until his rediscovery during the 1960s by young poets, notably Tom Pickard, who were interested in working with the Modernist tradition. In 1966, he published his major long poem Briggflatts. This was both a kind of autobiography and a celebration of the Northumbrian dialect. The critic Cyril Connolly described it as "the finest long poem to have been published in England since T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets".