Peter Makin, editor Basil Bunting on Poetry. Johns Hopkins University Press 232 pages, $42

From an American vantage point, it may seem as if the Northumbrian poet Basil Bunting by rights ought to round out a raffish group portrait alongside Welshman David Jones and Scotsman Hugh MacDiarmid, unreconstructed renegades from the brambly fringes of modern English letters who appear to have put their talent into their work and their genius into their idiosyncrasy. What makes Bunting (1900–1985) an anomaly of another color, however, is that he continues to be principally known for having made common cause with a roughneck Yank by the name of Pound. “One of Ezra’s more savage disciples,” is how Yeats put it, and that was long before Bunting produced Briggflats (1966), his magnum opus in the densely orchestrated late Pound manner that certified the affiliation once and for all. These trappings have assured Bunting a secure niche in the voluminous annals of Poundiana, figuring in the festschrifts as a charter clan member and a pivotal British claimant in the collateral descent of the Pound line.

For all that, the circumstantial evidence suggests that Bunting was a combustible force unto himself, large enough to contain, if not multitudes, then at least an unruly bundle of contradictory impulses. Quaker-educated and a conscientious objector in the Great War; student at the London School of Economics and an editor at Ford Madox Ford’s Transatlantic Review (where he succeeded a young gun named Hemingway); a self-taught translator from the classical Persian, which led to an eventfully checkered diplomatic posting and a tenure as Persian correspondent for the London Times; an inveterate peripatetic who lived in Paris, Italy, the U.S., and the Canary Islands, yet also a fierce provincial who was drawn back to his native shires in midlife and toiled obscurely as a newspaperman—it is not exactly the curriculum vitae of a born camp follower.

So where did it ultimately take him, this path of most resistance? And what does his perseverance add up to: the triumph of an iconoclast or the tribulations of an epigone? The first thing that can be said for Basil Bunting on Poetry, a diverting volume of lectures gamely reconstructed from rough drafts and audiotapes, is that it should squelch the temptation to caricature Bunting as some roaring Caliban sprung into free verse by Pound’s rough magic. On the contrary, it’s a measure of his resilient instincts and ambidextrous enthusiasms that his presence survives these disinterred orations with such bracing panache, still vividly serving notice that we’re in the company of a tough old bird with a mind of his own and an ear to be reckoned with. The university lecture hall, one might have thought, should have held about as much allure as an army barracks for a maverick of Bunting’s bent, yet there he was, holding forth fortnightly with all due gusto at Newcastle University over the 1969–70 term, and again in 1974. What’s more, he comes off as entirely in his element, plainly well-pleased to have received the casting call to play the indomitable tribal elder.

Despite a sidelong disclaimer that his views are but those of a “browsing amateur,” Bunting’s determination to hold court on the English word hoard is evident from the outset. Instead of rehashing the old turf wars or indulging in anecdotal palaver, he lays out in his opening lectures an expansive narrative scheme with a bold revisionist thrust, harking back to the deep ancestral past (the bedrock four-beat measure of Anglo-Saxon verse, the sinuously stylized art of the Lindisfarne Gospels, the shapely rhythmic architecture of Tudor songcraft), and then proceeding to build a case for seeing the metrical and compositional revolt of Pound, Zukofsky, and company as a radical restoration of authentic musical form over the deadening tick of the metronome.

Heady stuff, however you slice it, and what a furious scratching of notes it must have set off in the lecture hall as the students tried to get it all down. Bunting’s main contention, fleshed out rigorously early on and somewhat raggedly as he presses onward, runs something like this. The seeds of English poetry’s corruption were sown almost as soon as verse prosody began to be codified in the Elizabethan period, as its prominent makers and framers failed to take their cues from the supple, wiry acoustics of Wyatt and were fatally seduced by the opulent diction and decorative mannerisms of Spenser. The consequence of blundering down this garden path, as Bunting tells it, was the stifling of a rhythmically limber verbal music based on natural English stress patterns in the misbegotten pursuit of an artificial prosody contrived to ape classical measures and continental “numbers.” Thus duped into hearing verse cadence “not as it was written, by the poet’s ear, but by the inept notions of prosodists,” poets striving to hew to the English metrical tradition have been trying to thrash their way out of the accentual-syllabic briar patch ever since.

It would be charitable at best to say that Bunting welds these tendentious premises into a wholly persuasive hypothesis. Some of the residual unevenness is owing to the sketchy condition of Bunting’s drafts (and in the case of the 1974 lecture series, a rash of lacunae), but no allowances for the gallant salvage operation that has gone into assembling this volume can dispel the feeling that much of what seems peculiarly makeshift and willfully unconventional here is more or less an accurate holograph of Bunting’s spiky sensibility. Even Makin, every inch the Bunting loyalist, concedes as much from time to time. (It is a trifle disconcerting, for example, to thumb back to the first of his copious endnotes and light upon the following caveat lector: “The reader should treat the historical detail in these lectures with caution; its value is sometimes more mythical than factual.”) But say what you will, the man knew how to command the bully pulpit. By way of buttressing his overarching themes, Bunting quotes liberally, dilates eclectically, fulminates irascibly, needles tartly, and most stimulating of all, riffs brilliantly:  

So the poets gradually lost touch with music. They lost sight of the vast variety of possible rhythms. The noise they made became monotonous, and though they tried to compensate for that by wit, the monotony was infectious —the wit, the syntax, the diction, all became stereotyped. They aimed at neatness. They achieved the sterile emptiness of a hospital corridor. There was no substitute for music as a guide. A poet must write by ear (nearly all poets compose aloud); if he starts counting syllables and heeding the rules prosodists invent, writing verse becomes a pedantic game on a par with crossword puzzles.

Passages of this sort—and they are rife, yeasty amalgams of shop talk, table talk, and waggish expostulation—pack more than enough salient pith and bite to redeem the patchiness of Bunting’s grand unified theory. And while there are moments when he will leap onto his hobbyhorse and tear off in all directions at once, over the long haul they are far outnumbered by stretches of insightful close reading and clear, sharp writing, grounded throughout by a tonic aversion to cant and a salutary streak of sturdy English empiricism. In this respect, Bunting acquits himself as a worthy match for his old master in the courage of his convictions—and clearly superior in expounding strong opinions without having recourse to the hectoring, browbeating spleen that roils Pound’s didactic prose. There is also the saving grace of Bunting’s bluff good humor, as displayed in this brisk little cadenza on the mixed fortunes of Wordsworth:

He understood from the admonitions of Coleridge and the example of Pope that a poet ought to propound a complete system of philosophy, and that left him rather in a hole, because while Pope had Bolingbroke to provide the philosophy (such as it was), he had only Coleridge, who promised it but never kept his promise. So the great philosophical poem that was to be the business of Wordsworth’s life dwindled to a prelude, and some skirmishing with morals by way of an Excursion away from the theme that never got started.

Makin, for his part, annotates industriously yet in his preoccupation with armature and arcana leaves a number of compelling questions about Bunting’s general relevance and influence unsifted. Did this stint as a lecturer signal an important shift in his critical recognition at home and abroad? Has his stock in the UK risen in recent years? Is his panoptic Briggflatts to be regarded as a tour de force, to be reckoned with as the English answer to the nativist testament of Paterson, or does it bear closer comparison to a craggier, nore forbidding epic like Zukofsky’s A or the sawtoothed Cantos themselves? It is not as if Makin has been derelict in brushing over these matters, for he has no doubt performed a valuable service for his fellow adepts (the sort of folks who would already have a copy of his critical study Bunting: The Shape of His Verse, on their shelves), as well as for up-and-coming dissertators. Still, it would be ruefully ironic and a bit of a pity if his academic taxidermy were to put off the agnostic reader who might otherwise take emboldenment from the animated ruminations of Bunting the browsing amateur. Amid the current vogue for prosody handbooks and primers on poetics, which as a professionalized genre inclines toward the clinical, the homogenized, and the ingratiating, the sprawl and audacity and uncanny horse sense of these rough-and-ready disquisitions of a generation ago offer a timely reminder that an apprenticeship in the guild of poetry is never finished, only abandoned.