Northumbrian Modernist Poetry: The Poet Bunting: A Strong Song Tows Us: The Life of Basil Bunting. Richard Burton, Oxford, UK & Westport, CT, USA:  Infinite Ideas/Prospecta Press ISBN 978-1-935212-50-8

There are plenty of anecdotes in this, the first full and scholarly biography of one of England's finest twentieth century poets, and also generous reading and quotation from the work. This last aspect of the book will be particularly useful for those readers who may be unfamiliar with Basil Bunting. Bunting in his youth was prone to such excesses of behaviour that despite being educated at two Quaker Schools, Ackworth and Leighton Park, and imprisoned for conscientious objection in 1918 he had been barred from several European countries by the time he was in his twenties, including France. Being in bed with his landlord's wife, physically assaulting a gendarme, sexually assaulting a lady at a diplomatic reception: these may be foolhardy (and criminal, and immoral), but they are certainly legendary. The question also remains about whether they are the actions of a psychotic. Unusually, then, for a poet, his life turns out to be at least as interesting as his poetry. The story continues, too. Bunting's successful service as a newspaper stringer in the Middle East (probably working under-cover for the Foreign Office) and for the British Intelligence Service, came about because Ezra Pound advised him to learn the Persian language in the 30s. When war came he found that classical Persian got him by very well with dialect speakers in the remote tribal areas, where he also enjoyed the copious use of heroin and vodka. Then marriage to a teenage Persian girl (legal in 40s Iraq, although it probably contributed to the end of his employment by the Foreign Office), poverty and public neglect as a poet, and divorce (though his widow is still championing his memory and work). In his 60s he was ‘discovered’ by the young poet Tom Pickard. He was inspired by renewed interest, began writing again, and wrote Briggflats, widely regarded one of the greatest English poems of the 20th century. Burton, writing about

this relatively unknown ‘great’ poet, quotes several admiring reviewers and the most convincing is the major poet, Thom Gunn, who said of Briggflats that it was ‘one of the few great poems of this century. It seems to me greater each time I read it.’ (7).

In the 60s and 70s, English faculties were imbued with the New Criticism, in which biography was anathema. This was encouraged by T.S. Eliot, who was terrified of biographers, and by the example of Ezra Pound, whose fascist life we preferred to know as little about as possible. But meanwhile, in 1966, Bunting wrote his great poem, Briggflats, even though he did not ‘believe in biography’ (2). Burton explains:

For Bunting Briggflats was autobiography enough. He scorned any kind of life writing as a channel into anyone else's art. For Bunting you can't understand a poem just by knowing the historical events that charge it. You can't even understand a poem by reading it. The only way to uncover the mystery is to hear it.’ (2)

It is this insistence on the essence rather than the facts of biography, on the sound and physical engagement with words rather than the written word, and also the aspects of modernist condensation and displacement that make Bunting and his poetry fascinating for psychoanalysis. Bunting the man may or may not have been a suitable case for psychotherapeutic treatment, but his poems, unsullied by any direct involvement with psychoanalysis, are often like a written-down and crafted version of dream work.

Sadly for those of us who love Bunting's poetry, he was the greatest poet of his century that no one has ever heard of. Burton does a good job trying to put that right, introducing the man to his readers, and in so doing pays close and helpful attention to much of the very considerable body of varied and memorable poems. ‘A strong song tows / us’, Burton's title for the biography, is a phrase typical of Bunting's verse. It is taken from the Coda to Briggflats. There are five simple, English words (though the use of Northumbrian dialect or of Greek would not be unusual too). These monosyllabic words, roped together alongside each

other, come alive. This is Bunting's genius: to juxtapose words. Burton quotes a review of Briggflats in which Hugh Kenner asks whether the first four words of the whole poem had ever been together in a line of poetry before (‘Brag, sweet tenor bull’) (363). It is easy but hardly necessary to do traditional literary criticism here: the five words ‘A strong song tows us’ exemplify Bunting's insistence that the sound, the music of the words is as important, or more important than the sense. Imagery almost overwhelms sense, as sibilant sounds redolent of the sea combine with an unusual and wave-like rhythm, with three stressed syllables framed by short unstressed sounds. The verb ‘tows’ holds a nautical, and/or agricultural image. The poem continues into depths of unknowing. Burton comments: ‘If the Coda celebrates ignorance, or at least accepts it as an essential part of the human condition, Bunting decisively rejected pessimism.’ (385) The Coda continues after ‘A strong song tows us’:

And it ends:

Like other poets who lived in the real world (Spenser, Marvell…) the poetry is about words, not about the world. Maybe Bunting lived enough to leave events at his study door.

This biography does not do psychological analysis of Bunting—that may be an interesting study still to come. Nor does it pretend to offer new or nuanced readings of the poetry, but it does magnificently what one of Bunting's Odes has as its core. I refer to Ode 1.15 with the line: ‘Celebrate man's craft’. Burton infectiously celebrates Bunting's craft.