Basil Bunting
Basil Bunting
Basil Cheesman Bunting was a significant British modernist poet whose reputation was established with the publication of Briggflatts in 1966. He had a lifelong interest in music that led him to emphasise the sonic qualities of poetry, particularly the importance of reading poetry aloud. He was an accomplished reader of his own work, and a born modernist...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth1 March 1900
confusion confusing psychology
The mystic purchases a moment of exhilaration with a lifetime of confusion; and the confusion is infectious and destructive. It is confusing and destructive to try and explain anything in terms of anything else, poetry in terms of psychology.
home cities names
Praise the green earth. Chance has appointed her home, workshop, larder, middenpit. Her lousy skin scabbed here and there by cities provides us with name and nation.
names months splits
Name and date split in soft slate a few months obliterate. 166
smart ears sound
Compose aloud: poetry is a sound. Never explain- your reader is as smart as you. Your reader is not just any reader, but is the rare one with ears in his head.
wine
Always carry a corkscrew and the wine shall provide itself.
real men fool
Men are fools to invest in real estate.
father hate spring
I hate Science. It denies a man's responsibility for his own deeds, abolishes the brotherhood that springs from God's fatherhood. It is a hectoring, dictating expertise, which makes the least lovable of the Church Fathers seem liberal by contrast.
islam anemia culture
Sooner or later we must absorb Islam if our own culture is not to die of anemia.
lines poet duty
The times are squalid. They always were. It is a poet's duty to hold the line.
purpose wells prose
Prose exists to convey meaning, and no meaning such as prose conveys can be expressed as well in poetry. That's not poetry's purpose.
age madness moments
Can a moment of madness make up for an age of consent?
silly wind sand
Our doom is, to be sifted by the wind, heaped up, smoothed down like silly sands. We are less permanent than thought.
what-matters looks sculpture
All you can usually say about a poem or a picture is, 'Look at it, listen to it.' Whether you listen to a piece of music or a poem, or look at a picture or a jug or a piece of sculpture, what matters about it is not what it has in common with others of its kind, but what is singularly its own.
determination fool idiot
But their determination to banish fools foundered ultimately in the installation of absolute idiots.