The Complete Poems by Basil Bunting

The Complete Poems by Basil Bunting

This is the first time that all the published work of Basil Bunting (1900-85) has been brought together in one volume. "The Pious Cat", a poem for children, a little juvenilia and a few limericks are included, with Bunting or Caddell's light annotation as appropriate. Bunting's poems were praised by Ezra Pound in 1938, and first admired by American poets, but he has since acquired an English readership. His translations have been greatly admired, and his long poem "Briggflatts" remains the classic introduction to this fine poet.

Basil Bunting is one of the most important British poets of the 20th century. Acknowledged since the 1930s as a major figure in Modernist poetry, first by Pound and Zukofsky and later by younger writers, the Northumbrian master poet had to wait over 30 years before his genius was finally recognised in Britain - in 1966, with the publication of BRIGGFLATTS, which Cyril Connolly called 'the finest long poem to have been published in England since T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets'. Born in Northumberland in 1900, Bunting lived in Paris in the 20s, where Ezra Pound rescued him from jail and fixed him up with a job on the Transatlantic Review. He later followed Pound to Italy - giving up his job to Hemingway - where Yeats knew him as 'one of Pound's more savage disciples'. For the next 30 years he led a sometimes wild and always varied life - in Italy, England, Berlin, Tenerife, America and Persia - as a struggling, penniless writer, a music critic, sea captain, RAF officer, Times correspondent and Chief of Political Intelligence in Tehran. During these years he built up a reputation in America as the best English poet of his generation, at the same time as his poetry was neglected in Britain. In 1954 he returned to Northumberland, and worked for several years as a sub-editor on the Newcastle Evening Chronicle. It was not until the publication of BRIGGFLATTS that his genius was finally recognised. He died in 1985. COMPLETE POEMS (2000) was reissued by Bloodaxe for Bunting's centenary and includes his original Collected Poems alongside the posthumous Uncollected Poems. It also contains a new introduction by Richard Caddel. A new Bloodaxe edition of BRIGGFLATTS (June 2009) includes a CD with an audio recording Bunting made of Briggflatts in 1967 and a DVD of Peter Bell's 1982 film portrait of Bunting.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780192822826
ISBN 10	0192822829
Title	The Complete Poems
Author	Basil Bunting
Series	Oxford Poets S
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Oxford University Press
Year published	1994-09-22
Number of pages	238
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.