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 2a/3

To add to the previous post before completing the sequence.

Literary critics  habitually  use the statements made by poets about poetry or about their own poems as though they were forensic evidence relevant to an enquiry, given under oath by a poet who has not only considered the idea carefully before writing or speaking, but has polished the statement and spoken or written in full knowledge that it will be used, publically, in evidence against him or her for eternity. 

I've done this. 

But the assumption this practice is based on won’t stand scrutiny. People change their minds, they say things off the cuff, they exaggerate, forget, they shape the story for the audience. Letters are written late at night, to old friends, for their amusement, a line is tried out, thrown into silence to see what it sounds like? We all do this.  But apparently Poets are different. Anything a poet says about poetry or poems or poets can be treated as revelation from the mountain. 

Critics plunder the letters and interviews, journal entries and articles for a quote that substantiates their preferred reading of the poem, or illuminates the poem for them and then they ignore the things that don't.

But what happens with the poet who grew up, became well-informed and changed her mind, realizing her youthful enthusiasms were just that: youthful enthusiasm and over confidence. Or the one who worked his way through a sequence of half-formed ideas to a point that was only final because it was the last one he wrote down? What about the gulf between half-guessed theory and the reality of practice? ‘Fear adjectives, they bleed nouns” wrote Bunting. Go scan the first line of Briggflatts. 

Imagine taking Pound’s early statements about poetry and applying them to his own later work. How may interviews are there with Bunting in which he feels obliged, or is asked, to clarify what he might have meant when he made that famous statement about poetry and sound?

We talk about Poetry as though all poems were the same, all poets operating under the same conditions, with the same aims and expectations. Which in itself is stupid, so consider how strange it is when one poet’s ideas, lifted from its context, can be used as some kind of Law of Poetry which is then applied not only to his or her poems which were already written, but to all poems.  

Frost’s “poetry is what gets lost in translation’ is a fine example. His definition of poetry was idiosyncratic. But people with no idea what that definition was will happily quote or misquote his statement about translation as though it were a law on the level of ‘pure water boils at 100 degrees centigrade at sea level’.

It’s rarely that you see a Critic take conflicting statements made by the poet at different times and in different contexts.

One of the many fine things about Richard Burton’s Biography of Bunting, A Strong Song Tows Us, is the way he gives alternative versions of the same event. His handling of  ‘What happened to Bunting in Paris’ is not only a fine piece of biographical juggling, but a salutary warning against the simplicity of finding a useful quote and using it to explain the poem or the poet’s beliefs and attitudes.

To return to that line: I hear Aneurin number the dead,  which I was imagining annotating in the previous post. Sister Mary Forde records Bunting saying Aneirin was someone who ‘ought to be known to all, but probably isn’t, the great Welsh poet of the early Dark Ages who left a splendid poem called Gododdin mourning the men killed at the battle of Catterick by the newly arrived English”. Qtd Forde, 1991 The Poetry of Basil Bunting p. 233

So we should add to our note on Aneirin: ‘Bunting believed Aneirin should be known to all’.  That’s what the words say. Convicted out of his own mouth yer honour?

But was he that silly? Does ‘known to all’ really mean everyone, including Mandarin speakers, Inuit and Basques? Of course not you say, you’re being silly.  

Does it even mean ‘known to all the people present where I’m currently speaking’, or ‘known to people with an interest in my poem’, or does it just mean  ‘There’s this chap Aneirin and I think he’s interesting and you should look him up?’ Or was Bunting being mischievous and name checking a poet he knew most people have not heard of?  Either the statement, taken at its denotative value is nonsensical, or it obviously can’t be taken at face value and its usefulness is questionable.  

And ‘Known’ what does that ‘known’ mean? The indisputable facts about Aneirin could be written on the back of a fag packet. The poem? Is he really suggesting everyone read Y Gododdin? Hands up all those people who have read the whole thing in translation, not just the odd extract? Not many.  Why would you? What's splendid about it? The number of people who have read the whole thing in the original, if you excluded undergraduates slogging through it under duress, could probably be written on the other side of the same fag packet.

This was a small digression. Back to annotations next post.

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.