If I may be permitted to blow my own tuba, I have written at some length on Bunting's Horace in a chapter, 'Soiled Mosaic: Bunting’s Horace Translations', in McGonigal and Price, "The Star You Steer By: Basil Bunting and British Modernism" (2000), which will doubtless be findable in a public library near you. I wish I’d had this blogpost at the time; the stuff on Bunting’s use of Latin metres is fascinating, and I would have profited by it no end.
As I reread 'One Poem' in small bites this morning, in Paris, with an unusual helicopter flying overhead (why? a demonstration?), a couple of other things come to mind: the line breaks and punctuation (esp. the full stop at the end of line/stanza 1 - it could be a colon, or a dash, if Bunting uses dashes - ) and the irony, if it is irony, of the last line. 'This could almost be a WCWilliams poem,' I thought. But is Williams ironic or is celebration his default tone?) That led me from Bunting's irony to tone in British 20c poetry versus irony in American poetry of the same period.
I'm also intrigued by Bunting's rhyme (and MMoore comes to mind).
(In my 'Collected Poems' (Oxford, 1978) the poem is in 5 stanzas; the first and the last are a single line/sentence, so looks more WCW-ish). I rather like the way it looks above, which, I think may be due to the difficulty of reproducing poetry lineation in blogs. It looks less random than in the free-verse-y shape in my book.)
Thank you for this wonderful post. It makes me want to plunge deeper into Bunting's poems and also brings to mind another less obvious connection to Leopardi's 'The Solitary Bird' or in Italian 'Il Passero Solitario.' <https://newcriterion.com/issues/2021/4/the-solitary-bird-a-translation>. Translators differ when it comes to identifying the bird in question (sparrow? dipper?) but some English versions inevitably, I'm assuming, make the connection to Hardy and choose 'thrush. (I've used 'bird' as a place holder.) Did Hardy read Leopardi (1798-1837)? I really don't know; it seems to me unlikely.
Purely personal note. I studied with Allen Ginsberg at Brooklyn College. He read my packet of poems & then we sat down to discuss. "It's not bad, but could you please cut out all the Romantic bullshit?" As a corrective he told me to read Bunting, specifically Briggflatts. Huge influence.
If I may be permitted to blow my own tuba, I have written at some length on Bunting's Horace in a chapter, 'Soiled Mosaic: Bunting’s Horace Translations', in McGonigal and Price, "The Star You Steer By: Basil Bunting and British Modernism" (2000), which will doubtless be findable in a public library near you. I wish I’d had this blogpost at the time; the stuff on Bunting’s use of Latin metres is fascinating, and I would have profited by it no end.
Harry Gilonis
As I reread 'One Poem' in small bites this morning, in Paris, with an unusual helicopter flying overhead (why? a demonstration?), a couple of other things come to mind: the line breaks and punctuation (esp. the full stop at the end of line/stanza 1 - it could be a colon, or a dash, if Bunting uses dashes - ) and the irony, if it is irony, of the last line. 'This could almost be a WCWilliams poem,' I thought. But is Williams ironic or is celebration his default tone?) That led me from Bunting's irony to tone in British 20c poetry versus irony in American poetry of the same period.
I'm also intrigued by Bunting's rhyme (and MMoore comes to mind).
(In my 'Collected Poems' (Oxford, 1978) the poem is in 5 stanzas; the first and the last are a single line/sentence, so looks more WCW-ish). I rather like the way it looks above, which, I think may be due to the difficulty of reproducing poetry lineation in blogs. It looks less random than in the free-verse-y shape in my book.)
Thank you for this wonderful post. It makes me want to plunge deeper into Bunting's poems and also brings to mind another less obvious connection to Leopardi's 'The Solitary Bird' or in Italian 'Il Passero Solitario.' <https://newcriterion.com/issues/2021/4/the-solitary-bird-a-translation>. Translators differ when it comes to identifying the bird in question (sparrow? dipper?) but some English versions inevitably, I'm assuming, make the connection to Hardy and choose 'thrush. (I've used 'bird' as a place holder.) Did Hardy read Leopardi (1798-1837)? I really don't know; it seems to me unlikely.
Purely personal note. I studied with Allen Ginsberg at Brooklyn College. He read my packet of poems & then we sat down to discuss. "It's not bad, but could you please cut out all the Romantic bullshit?" As a corrective he told me to read Bunting, specifically Briggflatts. Huge influence.
A fascinating introduction to two things I know very little about, Bunting and quantitative metre. Many thanks!