Basil Bunting vs T. S. Eliot
Elaborate publishing histories are not uncommon in the story of Modernism, but few can be quite so tortuous as that of Basil Bunting. Born in 1900 in a mining village outside Newcastle upon Tyne (his father, the pit doctor, was a distinguished histologist and a member of the Fabian Society, his mother the daughter of a colliery engineer), in 1919 he discovered Ezra Pound’s “Homage to Sextus Propertius” and the early work of T. S. Eliot, enrolled at the London School of Economics, then, after requesting a gap year “to study the condition of Communism in Russia”, travelled through Sweden and Norway before being turned back for passport irregularities and deported to Newcastle. In 1923, he abandoned his studies and ran off to Paris, where he served as an editorial assistant and general factotum to Ford Madox Ford for a few months on the Transatlantic Review and met Pound. After a spell back in London and a year writing and sailing sand-boats for a living near Pound in Rapallo, and partly inspired no doubt by the opera, Le Testament de Villon, that the older poet was working on at the time, he composed a long poem in which fragments of Villon’s life and work are kaleidoscoped together (the speaker has the DT’s) with recollections of his own experience of incarceration – first at Wormwood Scrubs in 1918, as a Quaker-educated conscientious objector, then, fleetingly, at the Prison de la Santé in Paris, in 1924, after a drunken brawl in which he is said to have jumped into bed with a concierge’s wife and kicked (or possibly bitten) a policeman. The following year he sent the poem to Eliot, presumably for publication in the Criterion, and presumably in its much longer, original form. It’s a very striking poem, what the critic Kenneth Cox called “a masterpiece not in the conventional but in the original sense of the word: work done by an apprentice to demonstrate his mastery of the craft”.
In March 1930, after five years spent pursuing a not unsuccessful career in London as a journalist and music critic, then roaming about with support from a new-found American patron, Margaret de Silver (six months in a shepherd’s cottage in Northumberland, followed by an interlude in Berlin, a second year in Rapallo and six months in New York, where he met William Carlos Williams and Louis Zukofsky, who was to become his lifelong correspondent and friend, and married Marian Culver, a young American woman he had met in Venice), Bunting self-published with a printer in Milan a chapbook entitled Redimiculum Matellarum (A Necklace of Chamberpots), consisting of “Villon” and twelve short poems, and submitted it to Faber & Faber for publication in England. Eliot, who by this time had met Bunting and had also seen a roll of typescript (with “two or three poems”) Bunting sent him in 1926, replied that he liked “[his] Villon very much” but “unfortunately had already taken on two or three booklets of the same size”. The Villon poem, which had now been trimmed to half its original length after some vigorous editing from Pound, would finally appear in print later that year, in the October issue of Harriet Monroe’s Poetry.
The next five years, three of them spent in Rapallo arguing with Pound “four or five times a week” before he moved with his wife and young daughter to the Canary Islands, were much more productive, and by 1935 Bunting had a 120-page typescript to submit to Eliot, under the title Caveat Emptor . To the contents of the earlier booklet had now been added several new long poems, and thirty or so of the shorter pieces he would later refer to as “odes”, many with a fiercely satirical slant. It’s a substantial gathering, and while none of the new long poems manages to replicate the success of “Villon”, the collection as a whole has a signature voice, a handling of cadence and syntax, that is audibly Bunting’s own. Again Eliot rejected him, jotting down on a covering letter from Wishart Books Ltd, who had submitted the typescript on Bunting’s behalf: “Derives from Pound, with a certain pleasing neatness. Worth recommending elsewhere. Try Dent – TSE”.
Similar reservations appear in other letters Eliot wrote at that period. In April 1932, he told Pound that he had been racking his brains over “Chomei at Toyama” (a long poem based on a book of essays by the thirteenth-century Japanese poet, Kamo No Chomei, which Bunting had come across in an Italian translation, and which was admired by both Pound and Yeats), but couldn’t see that it was “much more than a fuzzy imitation of the cantos”. Then in a reference he wrote for the Guggenheim Foundation later the same year (Bunting by this time had started teaching himself classical Persian and was applying to translate Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh, “an epic eight times as long as the Iliad [that] will take most of my lifetime”), he spelled out his misgivings in full: “a very intelligent man and an able poet. I say ‘able’ because I am still doubtful whether he will ever accomplish anything of great importance as an original author. I think he has just the qualities to qualify him as a translator of poetry”. Faber did, of course, publish fifty pages of Bunting’s work in Pound’s Active Anthology the following year, but it’s hard to see this as a sign of approval on Eliot’s part, since the book was commissioned by his colleague Frank Morley while Eliot was away in America, lecturing at Harvard, and in a letter to Pound shortly before publication he dismissed the contents of the anthology as “tripe”.
It probably didn’t help matters that Bunting had attacked Eliot in print not once but twice in 1932, and on both sides of the Atlantic – first in the February issue of Poetry, then in September in the New English Weekly – nor that he could be said to have satirized him on a more personal level in a poem that, though not published in full until many years later, was part of the Caveat Emptor typescripｔ: “Attis, or: Something Missing”. And in a way, of course, Eliot was right, since with the exception of “Villon” and a handful of the early odes, most of the poems on which Bunting’s reputation ultimately rests (not only Briggflatts, but many of his most beautiful shorter poems and translations as well) had yet to be written.
Be all that as it may, the failure of Caveat Emptor to find a publisher (it spent two years doing the rounds, Don Share tells us) effectively marked the end of Bunting’s early career; and as so often in his life, one calamity led to another. In 1937, he moved from the Canaries (which he loathed) to New York, then London, only to be abandoned by his wife, who ran off to America with the children while pregnant with their third child. Bunting’s response was to re-tailor his life in accordance with the maxim he had adopted for poetry, “Dichten=condensare”. He bought a six-ton sailing boat and spent a year “harpooning congers and netting herring” off the south coast of England in a kind of maritime reprise of the life evoked in “Chomei at Toyama”; then hawked his seafaring skills around New York and Los Angeles before enlisting in the RAF at the outbreak of the Second World War. The emphasis of his life at this point shifted dramatically, and is vividly summarized in a letter he wrote to Dorothy Pound in November 1946:
I spent the whole war with the RAF, first as aircraftsman, then as corporal & finally as an officer – finishing up as Squadron Leader. Saw many fronts: North Sea – protecting convoys in a small yacht; Persia, before Alamein & Stalingrad, when it looked like being the next on the German list; Tripoli, the battle of Wadi Akarit; the last weeks of the Siege of Malta: I arranged the “war room” for Eisenhower for the Sicilian Invasion and then went over to Catania with a fighter-squadron, captured Cotrone [Crotone] on my own initiative: in Naples during the fighting north of the City – I just missed being blown up by the delay-action bomb which destroyed the Post Office there: back to England with the squadron to cover the invasion of Normandy: then out again to Persia with the Political Intelligence: lent to the foreign office as Vice-Consul of Isfahan – that was a grand job, often amongst the nomadic mountain-tribes, who taught me to ride & to shoot moufflon and ibex: and at last chief of all our Political Intelligence in Persia, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, etc.
Four months later, he was back in Persia, first as head of Political Intelligence at the British Embassy in Tehran, then, after his marriage to a beautiful, “barbarous” young Armenian-Kurdish girl, as special correspondent for The Times. Though he grumbled about his salary and was soon overcome by his “ancient hatred” of journalism, the description given of him by an American visitor at the time suggests he would happily have ended his days there:
There was a red-tiled swimming-pool, and the poet was credited with possessing the best cook and the best collection of whisky in Teheran. He possessed a passionate love of Persia, translated their poetry superbly, knew many Persian dialects and thought the world and ambition well lost as long as he could remain in his garden, with his exquisitely handsome Armenian wife, his books and his pipes.
For reasons that are not known, neither post was renewed, and it’s not impossible, given Bunting’s love of the Iranian people and his lifelong hostility to organized politics (“I am for thwarting . . . all the governments”, he wrote to Dorothy Pound in December 1946, “especially the more powerful and effective ones”), that he was perceived to be undermining what he elsewhere described as the “huge blunders” of Anglo-American diplomacy in the Middle East. Whatever the explanation, he remained on the Times payroll, and, after six months back in Northumberland, was dispatched, first to Rome, in October 1950, then the following autumn once more to Tehran, where he resumed his Persian idyll before being expelled for good by the Prime Minister Mossadegh in May 1952. After an epic car journey in which he and his young family were fired on twice, he washed up once more at his mother’s home in Throckley.
It was at this point that Bunting approached Eliot for the third, and possibly fourth, time (dates in Bunting’s life tend to be a bit slippery, and accounts differ as to whether he went to him once or twice). First, in late 1950, with a copy of Poems: 1950, a book compiled and published by one of Pound’s crankier American disciples that is basically a revised and updated version of the Redimiculum Matellarum typescript, with a few early poems stripped out and replaced by odes from the late 1930s and 40s (“Let them remember Samangan”, “The Orotava Road”), and one of the first and most beautiful of Bunting’s translations from the Persian, “When the sword of sixty” (which Eliot did, incidentally, publish, in the Criterion, in 1936); plus “The Well of Lycopolis”, a long and “very bitter” poem, as Bunting was later to describe it, written in the Canaries in 1935 and featuring Venus as a garrulous old whore. Then (if Richard Burton, the author of the biography A Strong Song Tows Us – reviewed in the TLS, June 20, 2014 – is correct), a second time, in 1952, with the same book plus “The Spoils”, a recent poem based on his experience in the Middle East that had been published in Poetry in November 1951. Yet again Eliot turned him down, and, judging by the account Bunting gave to Zukofsky (in reported speech, note), in no uncertain terms: “The poetry is good, some of it very good indeed, and the writing is clean and workmanlike, with no fluff, but . . . they are still too much under the influence of Pound for the stage which you have reached”.
For Bunting, who was now well into middle age and once more casting about for employment, it must have been like being slapped down by the head prefect. The next twelve years were his traversée du désert, as he toiled to support his family in a succession of poorly paid jobs – proofreading suburban train timetables and seedsmen’s catalogues, then working nights as a sub-editor on the Newcastle Daily Journal before switching to a day shift on the financial pages of the Evening Chronicle – but otherwise appears to have withdrawn into a shell. The paucity of the biographical record for this period is striking. His wife moved back to Iran for a time with the children, in what must have felt ominously like a re-run of his first marriage. There were two radio broadcasts, in 1954 and 1957, engineered by his friends Geoffrey Bridson (one-time contributor to the Active Anthology who had become an influential arts programme editor at the BBC) and the poet Denis Goacher, whom Bunting had met in 1952 through Pound; and the first signs of interest from a younger generation of writers: Gael Turnbull in 1956, Robert Creeley and Jonathan Williams in 1963. Then, out of nowhere seemingly, in the winter of 1964–5, only months after penning the most abject, despairing letter to Goacher (“I feel I have been dead for ten years. My ghost doesn’t walk. Dante has nothing to tell me about Hell that I don’t know for myself”), Bunting started piecing together and composing – on the train to and from work each day, if you please! – the materials for what is widely regarded as one of the finest poems of the twentieth century, the five-part masterwork named after the Quaker Meeting-House of his childhood, Briggflatts.
Just what gathering of headwaters had come together over the years to make possible this great, stately outpouring, in which the story of Bunting’s boyhood love for Peggy Greenbank (notice the pastoral, folk-ballad overtones of her surname) washes back and forth with the submerged history of Northumbria – the vestiges or “traces overwritten by time” that, as Peter Quartermain pointed out in Stubborn Poetries, 2013, are addressed repeatedly in the odes and “overdrafts” – we may never know, but Bunting’s characteristically gruff, matter-of-fact explanation, in a letter to Dorothy Pound (“Well, I thought, if poetry really has the power to renew itself, I better write something for these younger chaps to read”), fools no one, I imagine. The poem’s versification and, still more significantly, Bunting’s choice and handling of subject matter are just too novel to have been hammered out with the old tools. Goacher thought that the publication of the Pisan Cantos in 1948, in which we hear Pound speaking as himself for the first time, must have played a part, and no doubt it did. But it’s clear from the poem’s autobiographical underpinnings and from some of its more lacerating self-incriminations (“He lies with one to long for another, / sick, self-maimed, self-hating / obstinate, mating / beauty with squalor to beget lines stillborn”) that at some stage in the preceding twelve years Bunting had not only gone through his entire moral wardrobe but had reached a compromise of sorts with the “lifelong reserve” he spoke of in a letter to an undisclosed recipient in 1965 (quoted in Peter Makin’s Basil Bunting: The shaping of his verse).
With the shift in biographical focus comes a whole new prosody, whether the masterly thirteen-line stanzas of Part I, or the intricate sound patternings of the later sections (though there are hints of the latter in “The Spoils”). Together they reveal not only a renewed interest in the alliterative poetry of the Middle Ages, viewed through the prism of Bunting’s re-engagement with his native Northumberland (according to Richard Caddell’s essay “Bunting and Welsh”, he even claimed the Gawain poet for the region), but a close familiarity with the metrics and cynghanedd of Welsh poetry – poetry, as he described it in cartoon-like terms to Jonathan Williams in 1983, for which “you have to use every scrap of your face”.
Briggflatts is Bunting’s Jericho moment, the great trumpet-blast of its opening line (“Brag, sweet tenor bull”) heralding the end of nearly thirty years of self-incarceration. Yet, as Makin remarked, not the least of the mysteries surrounding its creation is that nothing in Bunting’s physical circumstances had changed. He wasn’t getting “an hour more of freedom from drudgery. He had merely shouted, and the walls of the prison were no longer there”. What was new, of course, was the visit, in the summer of 1964, from the teenage Tom Pickard, a sort of reverse Person from Porlock with “a fist full of manuscript”; and, in the wake of that meeting, Bunting’s exposure to the counter-culture of the early 1960s, the “delinquent mix”, in Pickard’s description, of the Morden Tower readings in Newcastle, the audience of “unabashed boys and girls” to whom Bunting would later dedicate his Collected Poems.
The other detail that has always intrigued me is the poem’s date of composition, which is always given as 1965, not 1964–5. We know from Bunting’s correspondence with Zukofsky that he had the broad outline of the poem clear in his mind by September 1964; and that, by December, he had written two short lyrics (“You who can calculate the course” and “Win from rock”) which would later find their way into the poem, but at least one of which he was still describing as a “self-contained fragment”. And we also know, from Pickard, who would meet Bunting during his lunch breaks regularly throughout the period of the poem’s composition, and to whom Bunting would read passages of the poem as it progressed, that very little of the material in the Briggflatts notebook (variously described by Bunting as containing 20,000, 10,000 to 20,000 or 2,000 lines, though in view of its small size, only the last figure is really plausible) ended up in the poem.
The composition proper, in other words, appears to have begun sometime in New Year 1965, and you can’t help wondering, given the complexity of Bunting’s feelings towards Eliot by this time, if the news of the elder poet’s death, on January 4, 1965, didn’t in some way remove the last of the manacles that had weighed on him for so long. The poem, in the meantime, a first draft of which Bunting had sent to Bridson on April 20, 1965, was completed at “midnight on May 15, 1965”. When you look at the pattern of Bunting’s relations with Eliot, it seems almost certain that he would have made the journey to London to show it to “the gin-sodden holy reprobate” (“no malice more certain, no kindness more ready”) he had chided his friend Zukofsky about some fifteen years previously. And I think it’s inconceivable that Eliot, had he lived to see the poem, would have turned it down.
Don Share, in his introduction to The Poems of Basil Bunting, calls Briggflatts a “challenging” poem, and in some respects it is: Makin identified no fewer than “seventeen heroes in twelve different plots”, and there are allusions (all duly fleshed out in Share’s thirty-eighty pages of notes) to Eric Bloodaxe and the early Celtic saints Cuthbert and Aidan, the Welsh poets Aneurin and Taliesin, the composers Schoenberg and Scarlatti, and (in what to my mind is the most perplexing passage in the entire poem) the hapless Greek goddess, Pasiphae. But it’s important to stress that the type of challenge it presents is very different from that of Pound’s Cantos, with its dizzying patchwork of Chinese characters and classical tags, or David Jones’s The Anathemata, with its rich undergrowth of allusions and footnotes; or, indeed, some of Bunting’s own more obscure earlier poems. At 700 lines, it’s only a little longer than Four Quartets; the structure, as Bunting was at pains to point out, is commonplace (the four seasons of the year and of man’s life, “interrupted in the middle and balanced around Alexander’s trip to the limits of the world”); and the diction, with the exception of the odd dialect word or technical term (“kelt” for the male salmon after spawning, “rebate” for a type of woodsman’s chisel), is a vigorous plain speech that Kipling would not have disavowed. It is one of the poem’s great achievements, in fact, that, while preserving the classical virtues of High Modernism, it is to a large extent free of the bookishness of the movement’s founding fathers. Bunting himself was rightly proud of this, and if there was a model he kept in his sights during the making of the poem, it was probably less Eliot’s Quartets (as is sometimes advanced, because of the parallel between Bunting’s Quaker Meeting House and the religious community at Little Gidding) than the later poems of Yeats:
The world doesn’t spend all its time reading books, and we all assumed that they do. We have far too many references to things. There we tumbled below Yeats. Yeats is very careful. He produces very few references to previous literature. His references are those you can find in the life around you, and that is much easier, and much better, and more provident, especially where literary fashions change. Eliot above all, of course, is using other literature all the time; Pound to a considerable extent; Zukofsky, to some extent; me also – and that will weigh against us as the century goes on.
The fascination of Bunting’s late masterpiece is also that of an eminently modern poem arrayed in the intricate formal splendour of a distant age – the age of the Lindisfarne Gospels, or the sixth-century Welsh bards, or Scarlatti and Bach, to all of which he deliberately and quite justifiably pointed us. This, I think, is what Kenneth Cox had in mind when he attributed what he called the “discretion” of the language of Briggflatts to “the long practice of a translator, the persistent testing of every word” – an observation that puzzled me slightly when I first read it (the poem, after all, though it draws on an episode in Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh for its central section, has no obvious debt to translation in the way that “Villon” or “Chomei at Toyama” do), but on reflection seems exactly right. “The persistent testing of every word” is not only a good description of the abnormally intense scrutiny involved in translation – a state of mind remote from, and perhaps even inimical to, the more floating, fluid forms of concentration required for original composition, which may in part explain why Bunting’s output was so slim – but also resonates deeply with Bunting’s Lucretian insistence on looking at the world “an atom at a time”. And this in turn points up something important: namely, that for all its Pateresque, fin-de-siècle air, Bunting’s conception of poetry as deliberately crafted music – a “[pattern] of sound drawn on a background of time” – is cut from the same stout cloth as his tenacious, Epicurean realism. As, one might add, are the Nonconformist, one-person-at-a-time politics that mark him off so signally from his elders: as he wrote in a furious letter denouncing the “abomination” of anti-Semitism to Pound: “either you know men to be men, and not something less, or you make yourself an enemy of mankind”.
Then, after Briggflatts, again next to nothing for the last twenty years of his life. Of the twelve poems in the “Second Book of Odes”, eight (including the counter-Keatsian “A thrush in the syringa sings” and the withering, pitch-perfect ventriloquy of “What the Chairman Told Tom” – a vein one wishes he had indulged in more often) were written in 1964 or 1965, spin-offs from the work on or around Briggflatts. When he tried to write, as he told Goacher in 1967, “it all turns out to be Yeats, Eliot, [David] Jones – whoever I’m lecturing about”. It’s a bizarre predicament, in the light of what he had just accomplished, a little like Cézanne completing half a dozen views of the Mont Saint-Victoire, only to find himself painting in the manner of Courbet or Pissarro. What we do have from this period are the magnificent recordings of Bunting reading his own and other people’s verse (as Bridson pointed out, Bunting’s so-called Northumbrian accent jettisons the burred “r” he used in conversation, and is as deliberate and as meticulously crafted as his verse), and his account of what he called the “documentary tradition” in poetry, a subject he touched on repeatedly in conversations and interviews and set out in detail in the two lecture series he gave at Newcastle University in 1968 and 1974.
Based on the belief that poetry and music have a common origin in the rhythmic grunts and cries that accompany dance (“words that name facts dancing together” is how he described Hugh MacDiarmid’s poetry), Bunting’s documentary tradition is a programmatic, pared-back history of English poetry in which he traces the patterning of word sounds from Wyatt and Sidney, Spenser and Milton, and “the beautiful end-stopped blank verse of Arden of Faversham”, through to Whitman, Pound and Zukofsky. It’s deliberately polemical, skipping over most of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and, as criticism, less subtle and inclusive than Pound’s (compare the little card of “suggestions” Bunting printed for his students at Newcastle with Pound’s much more nuanced “A Few Dont’s”), but precisely because of its narrowness of focus, is full of arresting insights. To illustrate that tradition, he also began compiling an anthology, the draft materials for which are now in the Bunting archive at Durham University. Together with a Selected Prose and a facsimile edition of the Briggflatts notebook, it’s one of those unpublished Bunting books that many of us would like to read.
In the meantime, we have Don Share’s annotated edition of the poems, a book that weighs in at 1.1 kilos on my kitchen scales and is really two volumes bound into one: 270 pages of poetry, followed by 300 pages of critical apparatus. It’s not a book for beginners (nobody, to misquote Bob Dylan, should read a poet for the first time with 20 pounds of headlights stapled to their chest), but if you’re a student or a scholar or just the more voracious type of lay reader who can’t know too much about a poem, you’ll have a field day exploring the notes and commentaries. Novelties among the poems include a previously uncollected group of “Fragments and False Starts” (including a long variant version of “The Well of Lycopolis”), an unpublished translation from 1964 (“Dante: Inferno XXIX”) and, in an appendix, the facsimile of a typescript draft of “The Spoils” in which you can follow Bunting as he gaily jettisons articles and conjunctions, strikes out a slightly pompous passage and corrects “Toads / sit on the threshold” to “Toads / crouch on doorsteps” (toads, in effect, don’t sit, though frogs do, cross-legged, in one of his favourite childhood authors, Beatrix Potter). Share has also ironed out occasional editorial inconsistencies in indentation and punctuation and, for the scholars, provided forty pages of textual variants (again mostly to do with punctuation and capitalization, though there are some interesting small changes Bunting made to Briggflatts during a reading at Harvard in 1967) and a table of emendations to the Caddell edition of the Complete Poems (2000), Share’s copy text.
The book’s critical core, of course, is the 200 pages of annotations, the aim of which is set out in the Introduction: “[to] provide any factual material which can eliminate what William Empson called ‘all trivial grounds for bafflement’, and also detailed information about matters which have or may have formed and informed the poems”. Both criteria leave considerable scope for editorial interpretation, but as far as I can tell (there’s no index to the notes, unfortunately), nearly everything that could be considered to have a bearing on the poems is there, both the many illuminating comments Bunting himself made (conveniently highlighted in bold) and a glittering, magpie selection from the friends and writers and scholars associated with his work – Zukofsky, Ezra and Dorothy Pound, Pickard, Turnbull, Goacher, Jonathan Williams, Makin, Quartermain, Roger Guedalla, Carroll F. Terrell, Barbara Lesch, Sister Victoria Forde, Keith Aldritt, Burton. A few figures who have written well about Bunting (Donald Davie, Jon Silkin, Eric Falci) have been lost along the way, and one or two more recent scholars (Alex Niven, James McGonigal, Richard Price) taken up in their stead. And while older readers will probably be familiar with many of the books Share has plundered (not least for the little glimpses they afford of Bunting’s marvellous prose), they are most unlikely to have sifted and sorted them all as Share has so painstakingly done.
The layout is equally deft and meticulous, with the annotations to the poems conveniently referenced at the foot of each right-hand page and not a typo in sight. The only two factual confusions I noticed are relatively minor ones: a note to Ode 1.7 muddies the Latin tag by citing the wrong sentence from a passage in Livy and then offers Quartermain’s accurate translation as “an alternate reading” (sic); and the letter of January 4, 1965 quoted in the headnote to Part III of Briggflatts can’t have been written to Makin (whose letters from Bunting date from 1984 and 1985) but, as it states in the passage in question, to a “fellow-poet” – presumably the same friend, “who prefers to remain unnamed”, quoted immediately afterwards, whose correspondence with Bunting while he was working on Briggflatts is cited at some length in Makin’s book. This is almost certainly Turnbull, and it is to be hoped the letters in question will be included in the selection that Share tells us is, at long last, on its way.
My only real quibble concerns some of the OED definitions and quotations, and the cross-references to books in Bunting’s library, which are mostly given without any indication as to the bearing (if any) they might have on the poem in question. Since readers who are not professional scholars are unlikely to have access to the twenty volumes of the OED, the material in question can be of real interest, though Share (regrettably, to my mind) confines himself to definitions rather than etymologies. The entries for “thrift” or “links”, for example, are obviously welcome, but do we really need OED definitions for “littoral” or “conger” or the verb to “rive”? Or a note informing us that “kerb” is the English spelling of “curb”? And if the word’s scarcity, or its use in a less familiar sense, is the criterion, why is there no OED definition for “bale”, meaning “evil suffered, grief” (in “ended in bale on the fellside”)? Or “painful” in the sense of striving or struggling (in “painful lark labouring to rise”)? Or the Old Irish word for lamentation embedded in “keener the kittiwake”. Or “blanching” (in “with light bow blanching the dance”) – is this a musical term (in French a blanche is a minim or half-note)? Or, in “The Spoils”, the verb “bait” (in “to bait on my journey”) in the archaic sense of “to stop at an inn for rest and refreshment”?
There are also ostensibly more familiar words for which I would like to have seen OED entries. For the opening lines of Briggflatts, for example, we get a full page and more on “descant”, but nothing on “brag” (“the loud noise of a trumpet”), possibly related to the Old Norse word for poetry, bragr, and linked by Skeat to the Middle Danish brage, “to speak great words”, all of which is surely deserving of mention for the opening word of a poem that, among other things, brags very beautifully about Northumbria; there’s also the sense of “to challenge, defy”, listed for Northumbria and Durham in that other famous word-book Share sometimes draws on, Joseph Wright’s English Dialect Dictionary); or “madrigal” (a “short lyric poem of amatory character” or “contrapuntal unaccompanied part-song for several voices”, thought to derive either from mater or, like “matrimony” and “maternity”, from the Late Latin matricalis or “womb” – all very apropos, I would have thought, of the lusty young bull who, for want of a lovely young heifer, chases his own shadow to the accompaniment of the swollen Rawthey). Then, later in the poem, nothing on “upbraid” (a word of obvious interest given the poem’s many allusions to the act of interlacing or plaiting) or the verb to “fret” (in “men driven by storm fret”), familiarly to “distress oneself”, but originally to “gnaw” or feed upon, and also to “adorn with interlaced work”, all three meanings performing beautifully in concert in the passage in question. And the mention of “curds” and “whey” in the poem “Birthday Greeting”, from a poet who loved nursery rhymes and once compiled a personal anthology of skipping songs, surely requires a note on “Little Miss Muffet”.
But these, as I say, are quibbles, not serious quarrels. Together with Burton’s biography, Don Share’s annotated edition of the poems is the second big Bunting book we have had in recent years and more than fulfils the task he has set for it. It also brings to a close the rather fraught history of relations between two combative and strong-willed men who, for all their shared love of poetry, had radically opposing visions of the world: on the one hand, the Anglo-Catholic “Pope of Russell Square”, who longed for a community of tradition, with its hierarchical order and its burden of obedience and dogma; on the other, the maverick, Nonconformist master of Briggflatts, who as he told Dorothy Pound liked “a life more physical, less logical, less covetous, less distilled out of the past, than the chained life we lead”.
So here he is at last on the Faber list. The ghosts of both men, I feel sure, would approve.