“Briggflatts”—A Northern Poetic Odyssey

Last November, as part of its Sunday Feature series, Radio 4 broadcast a 45-minute programme about Basil Bunting’s poem, Briggflatts. It was presented by the former Conservative MP and Government minister, Rory Stewart, and can still be heard on BBC Sounds. An immediate success when it was first published in 1966, the poem is described in the programme’s introduction as ‘a neglected masterpiece’ and Stewart claims that it is largely unknown today. His aim is to debunk the myth that writing it plucked Bunting from obscurity in old age and turned him overnight into an international poetry celebrity, whereas the truth is that he was a much more cosmopolitan and complex figure.

The programme was recorded in various locations: Briggflatts itself, the Quaker meeting house in Cumbria, where Bunting and his childhood sweetheart, Peggy, are said to have consummated the ‘marriage’ they had contracted by performing the Quaker wedding service alone together; Wylam Station from which Bunting made the short commute to Newcastle upon Tyne, when he worked as a rather elderly, junior sub-editor on the Evening Chronicle, writing—he said—three lines on the way in and three on the way out; and Morden Tower, on Newcastle’s mediaeval walls, where the young Tom Pickard invited Bunting to give the readings that re-established him as a poet. Northumbrian pipes provide the background, as does traffic noise, with Stewart up on Stainmore, where Eric Bloodaxe, the last King of Northumbria, was killed. Interviewees include the American poets, Don Share, former Editor of Poetry, who has edited Bunting’s poems, and August Kleinzahler, a pupil of Bunting’s in British Columbia, as well as Neil Astley, the Editor of Bloodaxe Books, the TV historian, Michael Wood, and Bunting’s biographer, Richard Burton.

The programme includes excerpts from a 1967 recording of Bunting reading Briggflatts, as well as interviews with the poet, who died in 1985. Radio is the ideal medium for a poet such as Bunting, who laid so much stress on the importance of sound. ‘Without the sound, there isn’t any poetry,’ he said and the sonorous beginning of Briggflatts is an example of what he meant:

Brag, sweet tenor bull,

descant on Rawthey’s madrigal,

each pebble its part

for the fells’ late spring.

Dance tiptoe, bull,

black against may.

Bunting incants his poetry in a style that even some of his admirers describe as over-egged or hamming it up, using a mode of speech ‘unrecognisable to any Northumbrian’. Stewart calls it an ‘undefinable accent with hints of Northumbrian, a Scottish rolling r and even the clipped tones of an RAF Squadron Leader’, which Bunting actually was at one point in his career.

The poem expresses the poet’s regret at having left his childhood sweetheart and moved away:

Fifty years a letter unanswered;

a visit postponed for fifty years.

She has been with me fifty years.

Whether the break was to do with Bunting’s desire to further his poetic career or because Peggy’s parents objected to his being a conscientious objector in the First World War, he left England and spent many years abroad in France, Italy and Spain, where he met many of the great literary figures of the age, including Ezra Pound, who became a close friend and mentor. Bunting was clearly a complex character. Despite his image as a regional poet, rooted in his native Northumbria, he was, Stewart points out, privately educated at a school in the South of England. A pacifist in World War I, he joined the RAF in World War II and worked in intelligence, gaining the rank of Squadron Leader. Fêted as an anti-establishment figure in the 1960s (a number of people refused to be interviewed by Stewart because he was a Tory), after the War Bunting became the Chief of Political Intelligence at the British Embassy in Iran. (Briggflatts, we hear, is heavily influenced by Persian poetry, which Bunting translated.) His father had been a doctor and committed socialist, who gave up an academic career to work in mining communities, but Bunting didn’t involve himself in working-class life and his northernness took root only after the poet, who was born in Scotswood-on-Tyne and spent holidays in Cumbria, returned to Northumberland after being expelled from Iran. Stewart thinks that Eric Bloodaxe figures so prominently in the poem, because Bunting saw a parallel between the betrayal of the last Northumbrian king and his own fall from grace.

Bunting was dismissed by the Foreign Office for marrying, at the age of 45, a 14-year-old Kurdish girl. Stewart sees this as evidence of a dark side to his character, akin to Eliot’s anti-Semitism and Pound’s Fascism. Bunting may not have been an actual paedophile, but it’s difficult not to share Stewart’s unease, when you realise that the following lines were written about Peggy, when she was probably no more than 11:

Rainwater from the butt

she fetches and flannel

to wash him inch by inch,

kissing the pebbles.

Shining slowworm part of the marvel.

Whatever the contradictions in Bunting’s character, there’s one point on which everyone seems to agree: that he was a difficult man, variously described by as grumpy, acerbic and cutting. When he wanted to obtain permission to publish Briggflatts from Peggy, its dedicatee, a friend tracked her down to the Welsh borders, where the former lovers met a number of times and—it’s thought—rekindled their relationship.  In 1977, Bunting’s Kurdish wife, Sima, threw him out of their Wylam home during a snowstorm and he lived the rest of his life further up the line in Hexham in genuinely straitened circumstances.

Bunting was certainly neglected as a poet for most of his life, but is Briggflatts really unknown today? It was a major success, when it was published, and although Bunting may not be a household name, few poets are. As one contributor points out, the poem can’t be a regional anthem, because it’s modernist and difficult. Oxford University Press have recently published the Letters of Basil Bunting (selected and edited by Alex Niven) and Don Share’s comprehensive edition of the poems, complete with annotations, textual variants and appendices, was published by Faber in 2016.  This is hardly the fate of a forgotten author. Share says in his introduction to the poems that ‘Basil Bunting has long been one of the legendary figures of twentieth-century English-language poetry’, adding: ‘His work is much anthologized and revered among many kinds of readers, and his name appears in countless renditions of the history of modernist poetry.’ Perhaps Bunting is better known in America than over here, in which case it is to be hoped that the programme (first broadcast on Radio 4 and repeated the following day on Radio 3) will help redress the balance.

(This review was published in the Summer 2023 issue of the Ver Poets members’ newsletter, Ver Poets Poetry World. To join Ver Poets and receive a free copy of the newsletter together with the other benefits of membership visit their website here.)