How minor is minor? ‘Rings a bell’ was more or less the response of two English literature graduates, now successful fifty-somethings, when asked what the name Basil Bunting meant to them. It is, after all, a good name, a memorable name. I asked a younger friend, about to start his Eng. Lit. degree at Keble: ‘Nothing.’ I asked a former literary publicist: ‘No, nothing.’ I quizzed a chap from the FCO: ‘Nothing, I’m afraid. Sorry.’
Perhaps not deep research, but I’d be surprised if Basil Bunting’s work was familiar to anyone not a poet or scholar of English modernism. Is this as it should be? Does he deserve a 600-page biography (any more than any other minor poet)? As a matter of fact he does.
Tehran, 1951, the Ritz. A mob is outside shouting for Bunting’s life. Bunting wrote that he ‘walked into the crowd and stood amongst them and shouted DEATH TO MR BUNTING! with the best of them.’ Most poets don’t find themselves in such situations, or, if they do, don’t react in quite this way.
He was a man of many parts, and his life was a fascinating one, running concurrently with the last century. Born in 1900 in Northumbria he remained staunchly Northumbrian, despite long spells in London, Italy, France, Spain, the USA and Persia.
He was educated at Quaker schools, and when old enough conscientiously objected to the waging of war against Germany. Indeed so conscientious was his objection that he refused to do work that freed other men to serve, and spent time in prison. He was later to spend more time in prison in France for violent behaviour while drunk. He saw, too, the insides of Norwegian and Russian jails, for having the wrong papers.
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