by ALEX NIVEN
Anglophone literary modernism, famously, has often had very little to do with English writers. [1] 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.
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As with the creative paralysis that stretched, more or less, from the mid thirties to the mid sixties, this ideological volte-face may have been another consequence of Bunting’s scepticism. A self-proclaimed acolyte of ‘Hume, the doubter’, and a subscriber to Wittgenstein’s dictum ‘whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent’, he was continually putting prohibitive barriers in the way of his intellectual and political impulses. A list of formative influences made late in life began: ‘jails and the sea, Quaker mysticism and socialist politics, the slums of Lambeth and Hoxton’. Outside the Persian interlude, Bunting identified as a socialist, eulogized the northern mining unions, and drew on a bedrock of puritan idealism as he sought to demolish traditionalist false idols. But his naysaying urge was such that it regularly threatened to subvert his own raison d’être. In his extraordinary mid thirties correspondence with Pound—letters that remain substantially unpublished, though Burton quotes a handful of key passages—Bunting can appear admirable as he opposes Pound’s increasingly vicious Mussolinian fascism. A famous exchange of 1938, in which Bunting passionately berated Pound for anti-Semitic remarks directed at Louis Zukofsky, marked the temporary end of their friendship:
Every anti-semitism, anti-niggerism, anti-moorism, that I can recall in history was base, had its foundations in the meanest kind of envy and in greed. It makes me sick to see you covering yourself in that kind of filth. It is not an arguable question, has not been arguable for at least nineteen centuries. It is hard to see how you are going to stop the rot of your mind and heart without a pretty thoroughgoing repudiation of what you have spent a lot of work on. You ought to have the courage for that: but I confess I don’t expect to see it.
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