Basil Cheesman Bunting (1 March 1900 – 17 April 1985) was a British modernist poet who became famous for publishing Briggflatts in 1966. This work is widely considered one of the most important achievements in the modernist tradition of English poetry. Bunting was deeply interested in music throughout his life, which influenced his focus on how poetry sounds when read aloud. He was skilled at reading his own poems aloud.
Life and career
Basil Bunting was born into a Quaker family in Scotswood-on-Tyne, near Newcastle upon Tyne. He attended two Quaker schools: Ackworth School in Yorkshire from 1912 to 1916 and Leighton Park School in Berkshire from 1916 to 1918. His Quaker education shaped his belief in peace and led him to oppose the First World War. In 1918, he was arrested as a conscientious objector after refusing to follow military orders. He was sent to prison and spent more than a year in Wormwood Scrubs and Winchester prisons. His friend Louis Zukofsky described him as a "conservative/anti-fascist/imperialist," but Bunting listed other influences, such as time in jail, the sea, Quaker mysticism, socialist politics, and the slums of London.
These experiences influenced his first major poem, "Villon" (1925). Bunting called poems like "Villon" "sonatas" to highlight their musical qualities. Other "sonatas" include "Attis: or, Something Missing," "Aus Dem Zweiten Reich," "The Well of Lycopolis," "The Spoils," and "Briggflatts." After leaving prison in 1919, Bunting moved to London and enrolled at the London School of Economics. There, he met journalists, activists, and artists. He was introduced to Ezra Pound through Nina Hamnett, who lent him a book by Pound. The modernist style of artists like Nina Hamnett and Mina Loy influenced Bunting to move to Paris.
Bunting left the London School of Economics without a degree and traveled in Northern Europe before moving to France. In 1923, he became friends with Ezra Pound, who later dedicated a book to Bunting and Louis Zukofsky. Between 1927 and 1928, Bunting wrote for The Outlook and worked as its music critic. His poetry was influenced by Pound, whom he visited in Italy. Bunting was published in Poetry magazine and in Pound’s Active Anthology.
In the 1930s, Bunting studied medieval Persian literature and translated poems by Persian writers. Their use of sound patterns influenced his own work. During the Second World War, Bunting worked in British Military Intelligence in Persia. After the war, he became a correspondent for The Times in Iran. He married a Kurdish woman, Sima Alladadian, who was much younger than him. Because of the marriage, he was fired from the British embassy.
Returning to Newcastle, Bunting worked as a sub-editor for the Evening Chronicle until the 1960s, when young poets rediscovered his work. In 1966, he published his major poem, Briggflatts, named after a village in Cumbria where he is buried. In later life, he wrote Advice to Young Poets, beginning with "I SUGGEST / 1. Compose aloud; poetry is a sound."
Bunting died in 1985 in Hexham, Northumberland. The Basil Bunting Poetry Award and Young Person's Prize, managed by Newcastle University, are open to any English-language poet worldwide.
Briggflatts, divided into five parts, is an autobiographical long poem that reflects on Bunting’s youth, his role in modernist literature, and themes like the limits of life and Northumbrian culture. Critic Cyril Connolly praised it as "the finest long poem to have been published in England since T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets."
A sculpture of Bunting by Alan Thornhill exists in the collection of the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds. The 1973 portrait is featured in a biography of Bunting published in 2014.