Basil Bunting

Briggflatts

Dennis BROWN

pp. 23-32

in: Gary Day, Brian Docherty (eds), British poetry from the 1950s to the 1990s, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 1997

Abstract

Basil Bunting's major poem Briggflatts (1966)¹ was published in a cultural world still dominated by the Movement poets, despite A. Alvarez's challenging anthology The New Poets of 1962. Quite apart from its prioritisation of verbal music over positivistic sentiment and its "Lindisfarne"² intricacy of patterning, the poem broke away from the consensus that the short lyric was the vehicle of contemporary poetics. Briggflatts is, like The Waste Land, a shrunken epic — though one as personalised as The Prelude. Influenced by Ezra Pound in particular,³ the poem could be characterised as neo-modernist — resistant to the current recycling of Georgian tropes and Augustan empiricism⁴ alike, while not attracted to the exciting excesses of postmodern verse as would be exemplified in Ted Hughes's Crow (1970). The poem exemplifies the quality verse can achieve if group-fashion is eschewed and the craftsman sticks to his toil. Though in thrall to a mythologised history, it also speaks to the environmental concern of the 1990s: its preoccupation with the spirit of place also communicates what Mikhail Bakhtin has called "Great Time", where the "chronotope" of many centuries finds particular articulation and "every meaning" has its "homecoming festival".⁵

Cited authors

Bachtin Michajl

Pound Ezra