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