The Book review is in part one.
What follows is not a criticism of
Stanard’s book more thoughts provoked by it.
Stanard follows the obvious path
and “All roads lead to Briggflatts”(p88)
and “Briggflatts was Basil Bunting’s
defining triumph’ (p.117). In a recorded
conversation, Hugh Kenner told Charles Tomlinson that without Briggflatts Bunting would have been ‘a
minor British poet working in the Pound Tradition’ or words to that effect. Burton structured his biography to mimic the structure of Briggflatts.
While I would happily argue that Briggflatts and The Waste Land are the only two successful long poems in the
Modernist manner, I think that standard narrative of Bunting’s life and career should
be challenged, if only as a thought experiment. Doing so might force a re evaluation of the
man’s work which illuminates its excellence. I’m not about to launch into the
detail such a re evaluation might require here: I’m floating it as a
suggestion.
The other aspect of the story that should be reconsidered is the role of Ezra Pound. Assumptions about Bunting’s relationship with Pound are used as a short cut to
explain Bunting’s relative obscurity, to avoid considering what makes him
unique, or to put him in a safe box where he can be ignored. Or to inflate Pound's influence and reputation. It doesn’t just
gloss over their falling out; it obscures the differences between their
poetry.
Just as Pound never managed to
write a poem to rival The Waste Land,
he didn’t write anything that was as good as Bunting as his best. Bunting
wasn’t a slavish disciple. He was too bloody-minded to be anyone’s acolyte. Put
Bunting’s Odes beside Pound’s shorter poems and Pound's don’t come off
well in the comparison. Put Villon
beside anything Pound had written to that point (mid 1920s) and see which is
better?
1
'All roads lead to Briggflatts' because
it’s used as a vantage point from which to look back over the life and career.
Inevitably this confers retrospective coherence and significance. It’s
difficult not to do it because there’s the feeling that in
writing the Big B he solved the problems that produced flaws in the earlier pieces. But reading everything as a progress towards
that one poem implies that the only interest the earlier poems have is as failed
experiments on the way to a singular success.
As a thought experiment,
acknowledge the brilliance of Briggflatts,
and then imagine Bunting’s Collected without it. This would force attention on
to the individual poems.
The Odes, like the Sonatas, are
uneven. Being uneven is not a criticism. It's hard to imagine a Collected works which doesn't deserve that epithet. But it might be interesting to argue that Bunting’s development had
more in common with Yeats’ than Pound’s or Eliot’s. There’s not a great deal of
development in style or form or technique across Yeats’ or Bunting’s Collecteds,
rather an ongoing refinement. Whatever
Bunting had, like Yeats, he had it from the start, and while their contemporaries
were off to redesign the spoon, and discovered the spoon is the way it is
because it works best the way it is, Yeats went on refining and improving the lyric poem and Bunting went on hitting and missing the mark he seems to have
been aiming at.
From the start of the Collected
the poetry has a characteristic drive to reduce, condense and omit. It never has the bookishness of Eliot or Pound.
Never explain, said Bunting, your reader is as smart as you are. Which is an ideal
to aim at and OK if your readers are Zukovsky, Pound and Yeats.
When Bunting gets it wrong, the drive to omit
and condense produces a ‘terse’ expression that gets to pithy and stalls. He makes the mistake he criticized Pound for; alluding and not
presenting. Some of the Odes and sections of the failed Sonatas read like
private messages that lack any kind of public context. The reader is a mere third party observer overhearing less than a complete conversation.
When he gets it right, the drive to
condense and omit produces poetry, but it’s ‘terse with music’ and a treatment
that presents what’s happening so the reader can follow. Often the poems
combine the diction and syntax of everyday speech without affectation. This
wasn’t something he finally succeeded in doing in Briggflatts at the end of his writing career. It’s there from the
start.
Leaving Briggflatts and Pound out
of the discussion does not deny their importance, but it might lead to an interesting valuation of Bunting as a poet.
However Kenner might have wanted to define ‘minor’, and it should be said that in
print he was much more enthusiastic about Bunting’s work, Villon is not the work of a ‘minor poet.’ Nor are some of the Odes
and Overdrafts.
