Abstract
Throughout Bunting’s small, precise oeuvre, the theme of work—and the notion of poetry-making as a form of work—is a constant presence. Key to Bunting’s presentation of different kinds of work is the advocacy of craft work as a counterpoint to alienated and enervated cultures. In this essay I will attend to the question of what, for Bunting, constitutes art “work”, and will consider the making of poetry as a kind of labour or craft. I ask what craft connotes, and what that connotation might mean to Bunting’s poetry. This is an exploration, therefore, of what the craft of his poetry entails. Bunting, who was born in the North East of England in 1900, was apprenticed in the 1930s to Ezra Pound, and wrote poetry until he died in 1985, was an important progenitor for a number of late-modernist poets. By looking at what the work of poetry meant to Bunting, as well as looking at some of the ways in which he wrote poetry about work, this essay provides a background to the growing tradition of post-war experimental writing infused with ideas about work and labour.
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Notes
- 1.
Basil Bunting, “Yeats Recollected,” Agenda, vol. 12 (1974), 45.
- 2.
Bunting, “Yeats Recollected,” 45.
- 3.
Richard Sennett, The Craftsman (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008), 10.
- 4.
Dale Reagan, “Basil Bunting Obiter Dicta,” in Basil Bunting: Man and Poet, ed. Carroll F. Terrell (Orono: National Poetry Foundation, 1981), 232.
- 5.
Dale Reagan, “An Interview with Basil Bunting,” Montemora, vol. 3 (Spring 1977), 78.
- 6.
Sennett, The Craftsman, 10.
- 7.
Sennett, The Craftsman, 20.
- 8.
Sennett, The Craftsman, 20.
- 9.
Sennett, The Craftsman, 20.
- 10.
Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading (London: Faber and Faber, 1991 [1934]), 36.
- 11.
Nicholas Delbanco and Laurence Goldstein, Writers and Their Craft: Short Stories & Essays on the Narrative (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991), 154–155.
- 12.
Delbanco and Goldstein, Writers and Their Craft, 153.
- 13.
Ezra Pound, “Canto 81,” in The Cantos of Ezra Pound (New Directions, 1993 [1948]), 538.
- 14.
Delbanco and Goldstein, Writers and Their Craft, 155.
- 15.
Basil Bunting, “The Art of Poetry” (lecture, 1970), quoted in Dale Reagan, “Basil Bunting Obiter Dicta,” in Basil Bunting: Man and Poet, ed. Carroll F. Terrell (Orono: National Poetry Foundation, 1981), 232.
- 16.
William Wootten, “Basil Bunting: ‘Uneasy Mason’,” English, vol. 51, no. 201 (2002), 237.
- 17.
Richard Burton, A Strong Song Tows Us: The Life of Basil Bunting (Oxford: Infinite Ideas, 2013), 355.
- 18.
Sara R. Greaves, “A Poetics of Dwelling: In Basil Bunting’s Briggflatts,” Cercles, vol. 12 (2005), 75.
- 19.
Greaves, “A Poetics of Dwelling,” 71.
- 20.
Basil Bunting, Basil Bunting on Poetry, ed. Peter Makin (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 36.
- 21.
Basil Bunting, “English Poetry Today,” Poetry, vol. 39, no. 5 (1932), 265.
- 22.
Jonathan Williams and Basil Bunting, Descant on Rawthey’s Madrigal: Conversations with Basil Bunting (Lexington: Gnomon Press, 1968), 32.
- 23.
Basil Bunting, “Preface,” in Collected Poems (London: Fulcrum Press, 1968), 9.
- 24.
Bunting, “Preface,” in Collected Poems, 9.
- 25.
Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, translated by Ben Fowkes and edited by Ben Fowkes and David Fernbach, Vol. 1 (London and New York: Penguin Books in association with New Left Review, 1981), 283.
- 26.
William Morris, “The Lesser Arts,” in Stories in Prose, Stories in Verse, Shorter Poems, Lectures and Essays, ed. G. D. H. Cole (London: Nonesuch Press, 1934), 496.
- 27.
Reagan, “Basil Bunting,” 232.
- 28.
Andrew McAllister and Sean Figgis, “Basil Bunting: The Last Interview [1984],” Bete noire, vol. 2, no. 3 (1987), 127.
- 29.
Theodor Adorno, “On Lyric Poetry and Society,” in Notes to Literature Volume One, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 45.
- 30.
Adorno, “On Lyric Poetry and Society,” 45.
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Haynes, A. (2019). Basil Bunting and the Work of Poetry. In: Walton, J., Luker, E. (eds) Poetry and Work. Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26125-2_5
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