Basil Bunting 'The Poems of Basil Bunting' edited by Don Share

I have been putting off posting this because I know it sounds churlish. But being but a churl (OED sense one, two and five). There are three previous posts about annotation that are background to what follows. 

Intro:

Reviews of a book like this usually start with a general statement about Bunting and his poetry.  It gives the reviewer the opportunity to strut his or her stuff and show how much he or she  knows. Discussing a poet who was painfully meticulous in his use of words, the reviewer scatters empty terms like ‘legend’, and ’modernist’ and refers to Ezra Pound and Yeats, or Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot.  He or she would make the usual silly claims that get trotted out every time there’s a ‘re -appraisal’; something critically vacuous like ‘central to the tradition of poetry in the twentieth century’. Last year it was Louis MacNeice, this year it's Bunting.

But a review of this book that discussed Bunting’s poems would miss the point.

The poems are currently available elsewhere and if they are not well known this book isn’t about to change that. At the time of writing,  the Bloodaxe Collected is selling on the Book Depository for 18 Aus dollars and some cents. The excellent Bloodaxe standalone edition of Briggflatts, which contains not only the poem, but a CD of Bunting reading it and a DVD of Peter Bell’s short film about Bunting is also available, currently priced at 16 Aus dollars and some change.

Towards the end of his life Bunting claimed:  What I have tried to do is to make something that can stand by itself and last a little while without having to be propped by metaphysics or ideology or anything from outside itself, something that might give people pleasure without nagging them to pay their dues to the party or say their prayers, without implying the stifling deference so many people in this country still show to a Cambridge degree or a Kensington accent.

If you read the poems, or listen to recordings of Bunting reading them, you might be inclined to agree with him. They work without being ‘propped up’.  

Jonathon Culler, in his recent Theory of the Lyric (2015), perhaps ironically, makes a related claim. Interpretation is not the only game in town. For centuries poets got by without academic critics. They had critical users. People liked their work or didn’t. At times Culler drifts close to suggesting that the minority status of poetry is linked to the overwhelming weight of critical interpretation and its assumption that the purpose of poetry is to provide critics with a launch pad for shows of erudition.

Faber’s much awaited, much anticipated hardback The Poems of Basil Bunting is an enormous book and is currently on offer for 44 Aus dollars. The Bloodaxe collected has 244 numbered pages.  The new Faber consists of 571 numbered pages, preceded by 40 pages of front matter numbered using Latin numerals.  The poems themselves only take up pages 5-271. 

The first thing to note is that the poems are buried under the editorial apparatus.  This is Don Share’s book. Poets need partisans and propagandists and publicists and Bunting has one in Share.

There is some new material, but it’s is hardly likely to make Bunting readers think they have been missing out on a previously undiscovered masterpiece. His translations of the Shahnameh were finally published in 2013 in ‘Bunting’s Persia’ and are included here. Eliot may have been right in rejecting them. There is a section of ‘False Starts and Fragments’, three unexceptional limericks, a facsimile of drafts of ‘the fifth sonata’ which became The Spoils, and some alternative versions.

For anyone who has read the existing Collected, none of this new material is going to alter their perception of Bunting as a poet.   

So would I recommend it to someone who doesn’t know Bunting’s poems? No.  It’s off putting, expensive and perpetuates the myth that Bunting is ‘difficult’. The poems become assimilated into gossip and speculation and are swamped. A book like this reshapes the act of reading and the effect that has on the poems might be worth considering.   

   

However, if you want everything in one place, then not only do you get All the poems but Share has pulled together information from books that are difficult to obtain and often out of print or very expensive. So if you were interested in Bunting, rather than his poems, and didn’t want to go the expense of tracking down the critical work about him, you’ll find a lot of it in here.

Share admits that he has ‘relied heavily-and with great gratitude-upon the work of Makin, Forde, Lesch and Burton among others, for this material. While doing so is not an original contribution to scholarship I am sure that my bringing together and organising this material from disparate sources as it bears upon individual poems is useful and unprecedented’.

Relying on other people’s scholarship is inevitable and nothing to apologize about. But if bringing together information about Bunting’s poems is unprecedented, the question is how useful is that information. I suspect it will be lost in admiration for the effort involved.

Would I recommend it as a scholarly edition? 

Cards on the table, I spend a lot of time using heavily annotated texts. It’s one of the joys of being interested in Medieval and Early Modern poetry. Based on that experience I would offer a simple criteria for judging an annotation: a) does it explain an unusual or foreign word, or note an unusual usage b) does it explain who names refer to c) does it identify sources, or meaningful literary allusions which might enhance the understanding/enjoyment of the text  and d) is it sufficient to itself.

D might need explaining.  I’m not suggesting that annotations can ever be all in all sufficient, and what one person feels needs annotation might be painfully obvious to another. But if you’re writing footnotes/endnotes/annotations then using them to point the reader to an unavailable book to check a statement when the editor could have done so is bad practice.

On those four criteria, the annotations here are inconsistent, often baffling, not always useful, and sometimes plainly irrelevant. It’s true that there is a vast amount of information in the critical framework but the editorial method is reminiscent of Nennius’s.  

I think critics, biographers and editors should be held to the same levels of scrutiny that poets are. Would I recommend it as a scholarly, critical edition? No. My reasons……

An Example

‘Villon’ provides an interesting test case.

It begins the collection.  It’s a fine, uneven, underestimated poem which should be far better known than it is.  It would stand comparison with The Waste Land  if the last (3rd) section didn’t feel awkward.  There are recordings of Bunting reading it that reveal just how beautiful it is when read aloud.

However, unlike most of Bunting’s subsequent poems, it is a very self-consciously erudite poem and therefore because of its subject matter and its numerous references, notes could be helpful to a third or tenth reading.     

The poems runs from page 5 to page 9.

Starting on page 275 the notes run to page 284.  This kind of imbalance is inevitable and not in itself a bad thing.

A general introduction to the poem precedes the publication history. This general introduction is full of literary gossip. It’s entertaining background, but the first thing to note is that nowhere does the editor say who or what Villon was.

There is a long note explaining who Clement Marot was, and a quote from Burton’s biography explaining the various puns in ‘hatching marrow’ (line five). But the model reader of this book is obviously meant to be familiar with who Villon was and why he might seem a sympathetic or attractive character.  

The first note to the poem refers readers to Villon’s Le Grand Testament, which is logical, although nowhere does the editor say which edition of Villon he’s referring to. This might sound like a pedantic observation, but Villon’s poetry differs from edition to edition; as with any early modern author there are arguments over who wrote what and the titles slide around.

Did Bunting read Villon in French or English? What were his sources? If this is a critical scholarly edition, then one obvious critical question is how well did Bunting know Villon’s poetry. You won’t find the answer here.  While noting that Bunting owned this that and the other books related to Villon, Share omits the key information as to whether he owned them when he was writing the poem.

Bunting obviously had a copy of the poems because he was reading them when he met Pound in 1924, as the general introduction to the poem notes. However, in 1924, he couldn’t have owned the copy of Oeuvres completes de Francois Villon which Share listed amongst books he owned because the publication date given here is 1929.

In this general introduction, before the gossip, there is what turns out to be a characteristically unhelpful piece of information:

‘Guedella B11 suggests that parts of the poem contain ‘borrowings from Hamlet, The Vulgate Bible and Chapman’s Translation of Homer’s Odyssey’

Guedella B11 is a strange reference as the only bibliographic reference it seems to point to is ‘Basil Bunting ; a bibliography of works and criticism’. So it’s not even clear who is making the claim.  If this is a critical edition, then surely the notes should identify these borrowings?  The use of ‘suggests’ leaves the editor free to make the point without substantiating the claim. This gives the notes an erratic quality because at times Share does identify borrowings and translations and give the relevant lines from the source.  

Either there are borrowings, and they should be identified, or there aren’t, in which case the claim is irrelevant?  There is no reference to Hamlet in any of the subsequent foot notes. Nor is there any reference to Chapman.

This turns out to be a characteristic of the annotations. Later the notes will tell us that ‘according to Forde ‘the mouldy bread’ and dry crusts’ allude to lines in ‘Ballade pour laquelle Villon crye merci a chascun’, and the vanished dancers and somersaulters recall lines in the ‘Epistre, en forme de ballade, a ces amis’ (Forde 154)

Although there is a page reference to Forde’s book there is no line references or supporting quotes from Villon’s poems.

What matters if someone else said or suggests or claims? Checking the reference in Forde’s book, one finds that Forde herself does not give line references to the poems in question either, and so the act of substantiating the claim involves at least two further steps. At the end of the trail one confronts the pointlessness of the activity. Did Bunting know these two poems, which are not part of the Grand Testament, and even if he did, what difference does it make? Prison was ‘dry bread and water’, if the bread wasn’t mouldy, or the crust wasn’t dry, it might be worthy of note but having a prisoner eat dry crusts and mouldy bread is not unique to either Bunting or Villon.

   

Reading the poem you encounter the line:

 And I too shall have CY GIST written over me.

Not knowing what Cy Gist means you turn to the appropriate page of annotations (p.279) and find:

Cy Gist. From the first line of Villon’s ‘Epitaphe’, ‘Cy Gist et dort en ce solier…’

which leaves the baffled reader none the wiser. What does it mean? Later in the poem Homer? Adeste? Etc  is translated.

The poem launches into that sequence of quatrains which Hugh Kenner so admired in The Sinking Island, and which Rosenthal and Gall, in their study The Modern Poetic Sequence, claimed would have been 'his major claim to attention' if he hadn't written Briggflatts. 

Remember imbeciles and wits

Sots and ascetics…

And you didn’t grow up when and where I did, where sot was still an insult easily blurring into the more offensive sod or you did, and you remember that both sot and drunken sot were insults, so you wonder if it matters which meaning Bunting might have meant here.

Either way you look up sot and the annotations provide this explanation:

'Sot. A common word in British poetry, including six appearances in Samuel Butler’s Hudibras and several in the works of George Crabbe…'

At which point I stopped reading.

Hudibras?

Why does six uses of the word in a poem that few people read anymore warrant a note…George Crabbe? 

Is this a parody of an academic footnote? Does our editor have a subversive sense of humour?

but read on and one encounters Share’s strange use of Cp. I thought Cp. meant ‘compare’….

'Cp. Notably Dryden ‘To Sir Godfrey Kneller’, 160, “good Heaven! that sots and knaves could be so vain’, and ‘Palamon and Arcite,’ L.432-3 ‘like drunken sots about the street we roam/well knows the sot he has a certain home’; also ‘Pope, an essay on Man’ IV.215; ‘What can enoble sots, or slaves, or cowards/Alas not all the Blood of all the HOWARDS’, and ‘An Essay on Criticism’, 271:’Concluding all were desp’rate sots and fools’.

There is no explanation of what the word means and whether or not the word is ‘common in British poetry’ hardly seems a point worth making. So are ‘wits’ and ‘Remember’.  Sot was a word in common usage, not a ‘poetic word’ at all.

The note surely isn’t suggesting that Bunting is using the word sot to allude to these other poets? Or that if you go and read Hudibras your understanding of this section of Villon will be enhanced?  Why are we being told to compare Bunting’s use with Dryden and Pope’s?  There is no definition of Intertextuality which I know of which will validate this information. 

If you cared about such things you’d find the OED gives two meanings, 1) A foolish or stupid person, a blockhead a fool (obs). 2) One who drinks to excess or stupefies himself with drinking.   The question would be which was Bunting’s usage.  I remember the word being used loosely in both senses. If 1) then it duplicates Imbecile in the preceding line and Bunting of all people is padding his line, if the second then he isn’t.

But this habit of linking a word or a phrase to other poems using the abbreviation cp. is often bizarre:

1) ‘Fat and scant of breath’ Cp. Siegfried Sassoon, Base Details, I, ‘if I were fierce and bald and short of breath’.

2) Shipless, Cp. Byron, Ode to Venice, 1ii ‘That drives the sailor shipless to his home’.

3) ‘Blacked by the sun, washed by the rain,/hither and tither scurrying as the wind varies’, from Villon, ‘Freres humains quie apres nous vivez’, which describes corpses hanging from a gallows. Cp. Tennyson, ‘St Simeon Stylites’, 75, ‘Blacked with thy branding thunder’.

In (1) the link is so vague as to be pointless. Comparing the phrases which aren't that similar leads nowhere. In (2) shipless isn’t exactly an unusual word, and the link to Byron is baffling. What drives Byron’s men shipless home is not really relevant here. 3) is a good example of how inconsistent the notes are. The first part identifies the source and does so simply and without fobbing the identification off onto to someone else. But what purpose could the Tennyson reference serve? And how is it relevant. It links bodies hanging on a gallows blackened by the sun with a saint up a stick blackened by thunder?   

In the quatrains there is a run of names. If you don’t know who they all are, it doesn’t matter; the point is everybody dies. But the list includes Henry the Fowler, Charlemagne, Genee, Lopokova, General Grant and General Lee, Patti and Florence Nightingale.  All are identified in separate notes, except for Patti who might have been several people and this is acknowledged in the note on her. 

However, when you reach Tyro and Antiope and have no idea who they were, the note informs you:

'Cp. Homer, Odyssey, Book XI. During Odysseus’ descent to the other world, the ghosts of these legendary women (amongst others) appear'.

Which is not informative. Who are these ‘legendary women’, what were they legendary for? Either it doesn’t matter, in which case annotations are unnecessary, or they do, and there is a purpose to Bunting’s choosing of these names and not other women from ‘amongst others’. Later Circe will be explained.  

And so it goes.

An editor once returned an article I’d written. I'd travelled all the way to Samarkand, been arrested and told to leave. After telling me how well-written my article was, she added: 'We all have disappointments, but we don’t publish them.’

I have a feeling that’s what I’m doing here.

Does a poet’s reputation rest on the quality of the poems he or she produces, or on the willingness of someone to turn those poems into the springboard for an academic performance?

Has Bunting finally ‘Arrived’ and can now be comfortably assimilated and quietly forgotten. The book is a fine resource for the kind of literary criticism that produces Phd’s no one reads. Should you be interested in the absence or otherwise of commas in some of the poems this is your book.   

Basil Bunting the Complete Poems, The Problems of Annotation 3/3

There’s an alternative tradition

I said there are two clusters of assumptions about annotations; Allusion and Intertextuality, which are in opposition to the third. 

The third is the hardest to discuss: the poem is a made thing sufficient unto itself.

It’s the hardest to discuss because it’s the most vulnerable, the least fashionable and seems to require a series of subsidiary clarifications which lead away from the simplicity of the point:  The meaning of the poem is the poem.   

If there were an historical character called Aneirin he has little to do with the Aneurin in Briggflatts. And if you knew nothing about him, other than what Briggflatts tells you, then you would know enough. Do you need to know that Dominico Scarlatti was so successful that he became so fat he had difficulty reaching his own keyboard? #

If you hang your hat on the idea of Allusion or Intertexuality, you don’t need to think. You can just state that both exist, quote your favorite theorist in support and then not worry about how or if they work in practice, unless your job is to annotate a poem.  Of course the poem is an artifact made of words, and words have connotations and histories. But that doesn’t mean you have to track them down every time you read a poem.

The problem  is that for most people, poetry is something they encounter in schools or, for a smaller group, at university. Poetry is something to be studied, analyzed and explained. You get good marks for showing how clever you are at the expense of the poem.  And that study, regardless of whether it’s critical or theoretical or any combination thereof, is based on an absolutely bizarre model of composition:

The poet has a prose idea, which he or she then wraps up in a poem and sends to the reader whose job it is to unravel the poem to get at the meaning.

Geoffrey Hill, in a lecture on the poetry of the First World War, compared this version of a poem to a tank. The reader’s job is to penetrate the hard outer rhetorical shell and drag out the meaning; the soft squidgy bit cowering inside.

Hill's point was that put like this, it sounds daft. 

Why would Bunting go to the lengths of writing Briggflatts when all he wanted to say was: “One holiday I was at Brigflatts. I stayed with a mason and slept with his daughter. After that things went downhill while I was trying to write poetry but fifty years later I’m ok”?

As Robert Graves pointed out in ‘A Survey of Modernist Poetry’ (1927) this ubiquitous way of reading is based on the assumption that the reader can and must get ‘behind the poem’, to the original prose idea which can somehow be reconstructed by the reader. More recent theoretical approaches assume it is possible not just to get behind the poem to the poet’s original idea but behind even that to the ideology or discourse that shaped the original idea in the first place.

And so people don’t read the poem as a poem, but as a coded postcard from the poet. Teachers ask “what do you think the poet was trying to say?’;‘what does the poem mean?’; ‘can you explain the simile in line five?’; ‘why did the poet use that metaphor?’ The correct answer to “what do you think the poet was trying to say’ is to read the poem back to the teacher. Instead, the poem becomes a puzzle to be solved. 

I think the idea of poem as made thing, sufficient unto itself, meaning itself, is something that has become swamped by the dominance of this academic/critical/scholarly approach.  And the institutionalizing of something called creative writing in the University has only exacerbated the process.  But that’s a rabbit hole for another day.

If you want to know ‘what the poem means’, and you think this involves a translation into a prose summary that will ‘explain the poem’, then not only do you need the OED and several fine slang dictionaries but an encyclopedia and you need them all open while you’re reading the footnotes to the poem you’ve probably forgotten you were reading.

But your prose explanation won’t be the poem. And worse it will be reductive and pointless. This is not the famous ‘Heresy of Paraphrase’.  Try describing a song you like to someone who hasn’t heard it, without being able to sing, hum or whistle let alone play the song for them. This is what you're doing to the poem.

A.C. Bradley in his first lecture as Oxford Professor of poetry, back in 1901, trying to unravel the argument about form and content, went so far as to claim:

The subject is not the matter of the poem at all; and its opposite is not the form of the poem, but the whole poem. The subject is one thing; the poem’s matter and form alike, another thing.

So back to Aneirin. Outside the poem there are facts about someone called Aneirin, who may have been a historical character, and some of the verses in Y Gododdin may have been composed by him, though if there was a battle at Catterick or Cattereah it will come as a surprise to some expert medieval historians.  

Inside the poem there is a name, and a cluster of actions and descriptions. The idea that somehow knowing all about the historical character will illuminate the poem is simply wrong. It’s an idea that leads away from the poem down a fascinating rabbit hole but ultimately goes nowhere.

Beyond knowing Aneirin was a poet at a time when poets ‘numbered the dead’, sometime in the past given the reference to bows and battle, the rest is superfluous. The only necessary information is supplied by the poem itself.  Supporting evidence for his significance  is Bunting’s anachronistic ‘before the rules made poetry a pedant’s game’:  one of those 'then is now’ moments in the poem. 

Aneirin represents a role for the poet that wasn’t available to Bunting.

If Bloodaxe wasn’t King of Orkney, it doesn’t matter. It won’t damage Briggflatts. You don’t have to read the Shahnameh to understand section three. Curiosity should drive you to find Davis’ excellent translation and there is much pleasure to be had from reading that story. But I doubt it will add much to your initial reading of the poem.

And the point of all this?

Apart from the excitement of waiting for the new Complete Poems?

Philip Larkin attacked the Modernists for their approach to writing poetry: As a guiding principle I believe that every poem must be its own sole freshly created universe, and therefore have no belief in ‘tradition’ or a common myth-kitty. . . . To me the whole of the ancient world, the whole of classical and biblical mythology means very little, and I think that using them today not only fills poems full of dead spots, but dodges the writer’s duty to be original. (qtd. Paris Review Philip Larkin, The Art of Poetry no.30)

In an earlier interview (1967) he had been asked about the same quote and he replied:

What I do feel a bit rebellious about is that poetry seems to have got into the hands of a critical industry which is concerned with culture in the abstract, and this I rather do lay at the door of Pound and Eliot…I think a lot of this ‘myth-kitty’ business has grown out of that…because first of all you have to be terribly educated, you have to read everything to know these things, and secondly you’ve got somehow to work them in to show you are working them in.

Larkin was aware, at least in the Paris Review Interview, where he was pushed to defend his claim: I admit this argument could be pushed to absurd lengths, when a poet could not refer to anything that his readers might not have seen (such as snow, for instance), but he represents an idea which taken one way leads to the blandness of the worst of "Movement Poetry' and the modern poem which seems desperate to imitate a postcard chopped into short lines.  In the other direction it's not far  to the usual claims about elitism, complexity and snobbery and attendant political and ideological criticisms together with the strange rejection of excellence or the pursuit of excellence in art as somehow unacceptable and undemocratic. 

What I think Bunting demonstrates is that it is possible to write intelligent, beautiful poems which will reward repeated rereading, but which do not need scholarly exegesis or annotation.  The idea that his poem's are 'complex' and 'allusive' and the reader is in need of crutches not only creates a straw reader with very limited skills and knowledge, but  detracts from the fact that Briggflatts for all its use of names is ‘its own sole freshly created universe’, as so many of Bunting’s poems are.  And Pound's aren't.

It works, as Bunting said he intended, as a made thing that can stand on its own and provide the reader with the pleasure that comes from reading poetry.  He said what he meant and he meant what he said. 

# I have no idea if this story is true. I've never checked its authenticity but it should be. 

Basil Bunting, The Complete Poems 2/3 the Problems of annotation.

In which he goes down the Rabbit Hole.

(This is the second of three posts about the forthcoming edition of Basil Bunting's Complete Poems.)

Annotations.

More than one of  Anhaga’s blurb writers noticed the acknowledged ghost of Bunting and Briggflatts. For the Blurbs click here 

So Briggflatts is a poem I think I know well, which often alludes to a period of history I’m supposed to know very well.  But I’d struggle to annotate it. One of the reasons I’m looking forward to this new edition is that I want to see how an experienced editor deals with this problem. I’m glad it’s his problem, not mine.

This new ‘complete’ promises to be ‘scholarly’, which means it’s for people who want more than just the poems. At a promised 320 pages (the Amazon.co.uk page currently says 624 which is daunting if correct as number of pages escalates) )  it will add 80 +/- pages to the existing text. I admit that I am a devoted reader of footnotes, endnotes, prefaces, introductions, appendixes, bibliographies and other scholarly apparatus.  Edna Longley’s editing of Edward Thomas raised endnotes to a work of art that at times were more interesting than the poems they claimed to elucidate.  If there is a rabbit hole to go down, I will go in search of the odd, the arcane and the interesting for its own sake.  However, I think it’s worth remembering that Peter Makin said Briggflatts was a poem that ‘should not need annotation but would tolerate it.’ I think he’s right.  

The first danger of annotation is that it can perpetuate the myth that Bunting really was ‘complex and allusive’. Allusive perhaps. And Complex. But complex in the way the carpet pages of the illustrated Gospels he so often invoked are complex patterns, not complex in the way the Cantos are complex blocks of words incomprehensible without notes.

There’s an example of this problem in Peter Makin’s book, Bunting the Shaping of his verse. Quoting the lines from section three:

Banners purple and green flash from its walls

pennant of red, orange blotched on pale blue,

glimmer of ancient arms

to pen and protect mankind.

Makin wrote that Bunting remarked in a letter that these were ‘of course the aurora Borealis’. Makin claims that this was traditionally regarded as a fortification to pen in mankind. The image, according to Makin, is from Lucretius, referring by implication to Epicurus, and that leads to a discussion of the latter and to a conclusion, a page later: ‘Epicurus is both Alexander the courageous quester, and the gentle slow-worm’. 

I have never read Epicurus and have only glanced at Lucretius in translation, having no Latin and less Greek and so this kind of annotation might as well be written in a foreign language. Should I now go and read both in order to understand something I’m reasonably sure I understand anyway?  I admire Makin’s book, but some of his readings of individual poems are far harder to follow than the poems themselves. (See for example his reading of To Mina Loy, Ode 17 in the First book of Odes. P.298ff))

Annotations are based on assumptions that cluster around two centres in opposition to a third.  

The first is the idea of the literary allusion with all its well-known problems. ‘Over there’, outside of the poem, independent of time and knower, is a body of knowledge which the poet explicitly gestures towards for effect.  The facts can be linked to the poem and that linking will be an important contribution towards your understanding of the poem.  

So yes Liam, off to the library with you, read Lucretius and study Epicurus and while you’re at it learn about Slowworms and marble and how to carve a tombstone.  And find a good map to check the route followed by the boy and girl, who apparently didn't go anywhere near Stainmore.

The other cluster groups around the more recent idea of Intertextuality, though different people use the term in different ways. The words of the poem are nothing more than a linguistic portal: you enter through them into language and trace out possible lines of allusions that lead away behind it like the tendrils of a man of war jellyfish in an infinite number of possible directions.  Or if you prefer a more visual metaphor, the poem is like a settlement on a map, seen from above, with all sorts of paths and roads leading away from it to link it to other settlements. 

Choose your metaphor and then if you trace these connections, not pausing to consider whether they’re there or you’re creating them, or Bunting knew they were there, you will eventually end up a long way from the poem.  You won’t know anything more about the poem, but the poem is really just a node where various linguistic strands mingle on the way through so it doesn’t really matter.

You can’t map the limits of a connotation. How do you annotate an allusion?  How do you even decide, once you’ve gone past obvious names, what constitutes a ‘significant allusion’?

Even if you accept, and there’s no reason not to, that there is an set of facts out there about who Cuthbert or Aneurin [sic], or Eric Bloodaxe ‘were’, the ‘objective facts’ especially in the case of Bunting’s early medieval allusions, are never going to be straight forward.

‘Follow the clue patiently’ wrote our poet, ‘and you will understand nothing’.

Take an apparently simple case where I don’t need a footnote. I translated both Aneirin and Taliesn while studying medieval Welsh. 

I hear Aneurin number the dead, his nipped voice.

Aneurin (Aneirin): Semi-legendary ‘Welsh’ or ‘Scottish’ or ‘British’ poet who may have lived in the 6^th Century.  He is credited with the composition of (or some of) Y Goddodin, a poem or series of poems which commemorate a (possibly legendary, possibly historical) massacre in which, after a year’s feasting, a brave group of ‘Welsh’ or ‘British’ warriors rode out from Edinburgh (?) to fight the encroaching ‘English’ and only the poet, or three warriors, or one warrior, or one warrior and the poet, or three warriors and the poet, survived.  The poem is made up of individual verses, often praising a named individual who died in the battle. Aneurin, or the poem attributed to him, certainly ‘number[s] the dead’.  

How much of that knowledge is necessary to illuminate that line? Or how much is your reading of that line improved by that knowledge if you didn’t know who Aneirin was.

Is there a reason why Bunting spells Aneurin with a U?  Should we add that Y Gododdin is famously difficult, if not actually impossible in some places, to translate? Editors from Williams to Jackson and on have been forced to admit that in places their reading of the words in the manuscript is highly educated guess work.  Arguments over its authenticity, authorship and the historical reality of the battle have kept scholars happily busy for years. Or do we need to consider the role of the poet in 6^th Century northern Britain, if we knew it, in order to contrast it with Bunting’s own experiences on his return to Northumbria after his final exit from Persia.

And why is Aneurin’s voice described as ‘nipped’. Perhaps nipped is more important than Aneirin. 

Once you start, where do you stop? And how do you decide what is and isn’t important. The other question, which is the one I’d like to know the answer to, is how much did Bunting know about Aneirin? 

Did he know Early Welsh? He taught himself Persian so it isn’t hard to believe. Or where did he get his translation from if he didn’t. The version I used as an undergraduate was not published until 1969 and its editor, Kenneth Jackson, pointed out that while there had been prior translations some were ‘absurd’ or ‘inadequate’ and the ‘epoch making edition of Sir Ifor Williams’ was published in Welsh.

What did Bunting know? There’s a throwaway comment about Welsh in an interview Bunting gave in October 1982: ‘Somebody wrote to us in Rapallo, I don’t remember who, calling our attention to Welsh, possibly. ..I took it up,  and have since been so greatly interested in cynghaned and so forth, and what you could do with the Welsh Ideas’ (Paideuma 38, p.20). But it’s not hard to look up cynghaned and you don’t need to know any Welsh to understand the idea.

And to what extent would the answer to that question qualify the annotation or illuminate the poem? David Jones used Sir Edward Anywyl’s translations from 1909-1910 to provide the epigraph for each section of In Parenthesis (1937), and much has been made of this. But Jones hadn’t read Y Goddodin until after he’d finished his own book. (See the letter to Harman Grisewood (12^th August 1957) qtd in Robichaud, Paul (2007): Making the Past Present: David Jones, The Middle ages and Modernism p. 58.)

Tangled in here are the associated questions of how much of what we know as ‘objective fact’ was available to the poet at the time of writing and how well the poet knew it, and if there are variations between ‘fact’ and its use in the poem are they significant. (There's another related one: How well does the person doing the annotations know the subject?)

Briggflatts is flatly declarative about Eric Bloodaxe’s career, but the history is nowhere near that straightforward. If you’re interested, watch Michael Wood’s ‘In Search of Eric Bloodaxe’ written and presented over a decade after Briggflatts was written, to see an historian sifting through the information about Eric’s career and what happened to him at the end of it.  https://youtu.be/Mokjnea_enM

Peter Makin, in his discussion of Eric Bloodaxe, relies on a book published in 1977 that obviously wasn’t available to Bunting.  Bunting knew Sir Frank Stenton’s Anglo-Saxon England, (see letter qtd in Makin p. 170) but Stenton makes it clear that whatever happened to Bloodaxe at the end is not clear from the sources. He died on Stainmore, but whether ‘in flight’ or in battle against enemies (unspecified) is not clear.

Would it matter if  Bunting got it wrong? Or did he make some of it up for the glorious roll of: Bloodaxe, king of York/king of Dublin, king of Orkney at the end of part one which becomes, King of Orkney, king of Dublin, twice/ King of York in part two, with its ambiguous dangling ‘twice’. (He was twice King of York, whether or not twice King of Dublin, or even King of Dublin or King of Orkney is not certain).  

Bunting did discuss his use of history and his knowledge of it in his letters though they often sound contradictory. If Burton’s biography is anything to go by, Bunting did love a good story. And the stories seem to have changed to entertain the audience, as they should do, when one is not on oath. Retrospective justifications and explanations by any writer are always suspicious.

The use of letters and recorded interviews to illuminate a poem walks the problematic line outlined by Wimsatt and Beardsley long before Bunting wrote Briggflatts. They might say this is all interesting, but once you import external evidence into a reading of the poem, the reading becomes ‘private’ and its public value diminishes.

I said there are two clusters of assumptions about annotations that are in opposition to the third.  See next post for the third.