A few years ago I was shown around the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh by a friend, an object conservator there, who pointed to an elaborately carved Maori waka taua, a war canoe, hanging from the ceiling. The waka was made before 1827 in Bay of Plenty, New Zealand. When it first arrived at the museum, it was badly damaged and was kept behind the scenes, for years deemed too difficult for the public to interpret in its fragmented state. But recently the museum enlisted the help of Maori artist George Nuku, as well as a team of conservators, who rebuilt parts of the boat, most strikingly refashioning the missing stern using clear and colorless acrylic, carved to match the rest of the highly ornate patterning, to complete the object—make it interpretable, visible, as a canoe. The point of the project, as of much modern-day conservation, was to preserve the object and enable people to see it in its full glory. Rather than attempting to hide the marks of repair, and restore the object to an approximation of its former guise, these additions announce themselves as additions and present the history of the making, the breaking, and the remaking of the object. The repairs are also reversible, bearing in mind that future generations of conservators might adopt a different view on restoration and intervention. The resulting object was magnificent, beautiful, a little ghostly, and perhaps even greater than the sum of its parts.
It is this kind of attentive crafting, this meticulous and respectful work, that Don Share has carried out, too, in putting together his critical edition of Basil Bunting’s poems (Faber & Faber, 2016).
While we might not say that Bunting’s oeuvre is in disrepair in the same sense that the waka taua was, Bunting is a poet whose modernist complexities have surely baffled his readers; his work can be difficult, fragmentary (“polyphonic” is a more positive term), paratactic, replete with obscure references to ancient and contemporary world literatures and historical events, peppered with arcane terms and various dialects and languages. Bunting spoke about his work infrequently, wrote slight, often mischievous or deliberately abstruse notes, and famously requested that his correspondents burn his letters, especially those that might reveal something more about his poems, or himself, than was there on the published page. Share’s book is a work of conservation because it gathers, for the first time, material to supplement and elucidate Bunting’s poetic oeuvre. It uncovers abandoned works, drafts, variant editions, as well as commentary from Bunting’s published prose, private correspondence, and critical work on the poet. Furthermore, it offers, for the first time, comprehensive footnotes to all of Bunting’s work, including Bunting’ s own notes. Like T. S. Eliot’s modernist project for The Waste Land, Share shores these fragments, both preserving and bolstering them by pairing them with the poems, simultaneously aiding the reader in the difficult task of interpretation.
Scholars of Bunting’s work have been troubled by his warnings and admonitions against certain kinds of scholarship that involve just such shoring of fragments. Warding off “industrious compilers,” in 1977 he declined an invitation from R. B. Woodings at Faber & Faber to introduce a new volume of his friend Ezra Pound’s work: “I’d rather leave the lid on my dustbin and the earth on my friend’s graves.” Pound himself appears to doubt Eliot’s aim for The Waste Land, altering the lines in his own Canto VIII: “These fragments you have shelved (shored).” Pound implies that Eliot’s project has been “shelved” or “shored”—the latter verb also means “to run aground.” The shelving, I think, also and alternatively implies a mistrust of putting the vivacious, great works of former ages into books, to be filed away in dusty libraries. Similarly, Bunting spoke out against particular kinds of exegesis and had a strong antipathy toward academic scholarship and its shelf-heavy institutions (though he taught in several universities). He insisted in “A Note on Briggflatts,” that this long magnum opus “is a poem: it needs no explanation.” In “The Poet’s Point of View,” he advocated listening to poetry aloud as the best way of understanding it, and warned:
Do not let the people who set examinations kid you that you are any nearer understanding a poem when you have parsed and analysed every sentence, scanned every line, looked up the words in the Oxford Dictionary and the allusions in a library of reference books. That sort of knowledge will make it harder for you to understand the poem because, when you listen to it, you will be distracted by a multitude of irrelevant scraps of knowledge. You will not hear the meaning, which is in the sound.
So what is a scholar and editor of his work supposed to do? Share navigates these difficulties sensitively, but assertively: he takes Bunting’s views into account, but appreciates that a growing readership might need more assistance than Bunting was happy to provide. While preserving and presenting aspects of his work that Bunting might have grumbled about, Share adopts a methodology that ultimately fits with Bunting’s ethos and, more importantly, preserves the poetry and opens it up to new readers and future generations. The method Share uses means that the sourcing and publication of Bunting’s drafts and fragments and the excerpts from correspondence don’t necessarily jeopardize the poet’s privacy or the integrity of his verse; and, crucially, the book does not prioritize Bunting’s biography over his poetry. The extensive annotations provided for each poem—sourcing clues to the poems in letters, manuscripts, biographical details, and ephemera—don’t presume to offer definitive or final readings of the poems, but instead allow a curious or baffled reader a range of insights to help them form their own interpretations. After a useful and engaging introduction, Share’s own critical voice is guiding but unobtrusive in the annotations: true to the high modernist tradition, information is presented rather than explained, and while these notes are extensive—even comprehensive—they are succinct. “Never explain—your reader is as smart as you,” Bunting advised young poets. Heeding him, Share anticipates difficulties any reader—whether seasoned or new—might encounter reading the poems, but he also anticipates an independent, inquiring, and intelligent reader: the book is a compliment to them. Furthermore, the poems appear on the pages unblemished by footnotes, endnotes, or asterisks. Share has thoughtfully added line numbers (and students of Bunting thank him for it), as annotations and appendices are placed at the back of the volume for the inquisitive to explore as an adjunct to the primary material of the book: the poems.
Prior to this new volume, Bunting fans could turn to Richard Caddel’s excellent, slimmer edition of the Complete Poems (2000), published in the UK by Bloodaxe Books—based in Bunting’s native North East and named after the Viking whom Bunting takes as one of Briggflatts’s heroes—and in the US by New Directions (2003). Given that Share’s edition of the poems is sublicensed by Bloodaxe, one might wonder what the advantage of the new edition is. Share explains his rationale for altering the extant Complete Poems, writing that Bunting’s verse was “modified” according to Caddel’s preferences, which he does “not share.” He highlights the differences between his and Caddel’s editions in a dedicated section of the book. The Faber collection adds two poems, as well as providing several “variants, anomalies, fragments,” and drafts—“false starts” in Bunting’s terminology. Throughout, Bunting’s own notes from previous editions of collected poems are retained, the juxtaposition with Share’s scholarly annotations highlighting not only how valuable the new edition is, but also how terse and tongue-in-cheek Bunting’s attitude to exegesis was. For example, “Villon” gets just one note from Bunting explaining the reference at the end of the poem to drops of quicksilver “from the late E. Nesbit’s Story of the Amulet,” whereas Share provides nine pages. Share also includes tables of all of Bunting’s previous collections of poems and the prefaces he wrote to each of these. In addition to these extras, many of which are extremely difficult to get hold of elsewhere, Share’s notes make this a timely, necessary, and unique collection. A reader might not realize what a feat it is that, at last, an authoritative, scholarly edition of the poems has been put into print.
Each of Bunting’s long poems—modernist in their range and numerous references to obscure literary and folk history—is treated in Share’s endnotes to a section containing Bunting’s comments on the poem (taken from letters, prose, and interviews), a publication history, and a guide to the most obscure of the poem’s allusions and references. Share presents this material at the back of the book rather than alongside the poems, offering it to but not forcing it upon the reader. The information he provides does not force his own understanding of the poems, but nurtures the reader’s own, allowing them to make their own links: surely the best way to deal with modernist poems whose references, complications, collations, and juxtapositions set up multifarious avenues for thought and generate numerous permutations for reading.
Share’s annotations illuminate previously obscure references, and will help to foster new readings of the poems. In the case of a poem like Briggflatts, which has received a reasonable amount of critical attention since its publication in 1966, extant readings are consolidated with Share’s research and Bunting’s own comments on the poem. Many long-term readers of Bunting will turn to Share’s notes to Briggflatts with great interest. Publishing such a comprehensive glossary and reference guide to the poem runs the risk that some of the fun of misunderstanding, or digging around, or guessing, will be lost. But what these notes bring to the reading community far outweighs these small gripes, and produces a modernist masterpiece in technicolor, opening it up to new readers and readings.
The draft material for “The Spoils,” as Share says, offers a rare example of Bunting’s compositional methods, an example of particular interest to apprentice poets. He includes material on Bunting’s interest in Persian literature, documented in further detail in his previous Bunting collection, Bunting’s Persia. The notes to “The Spoils” are enlightening, helping to highlight the politics and spirituality behind this complicated poem. It’s a poem that doesn’t give itself up easily, but Share’s annotations emphasize the poem’s focal points: it’s not as much about religion as it is about money, luxury, material wealth, beauty, sex, sensuality, and war.
The richness of Bunting’s tapestries are revealed by Share’s annotations: references the casual reader might overlook are explored in detail, and with reference to multiple and sometimes conflicting readings, such as the intriguing line about “the Emperor with the Golden Hands” that Bunting adapts from François Villon’s Le Testament. Share explains current Villon scholarship, and includes Peter Makin’s and Richard Burton’s different interpretations of the reference, without drawing his own conclusion, leaving the reader to decide for themselves. Share’s notes also reveal the structure of Bunting’ s work as never before. We can see, for example, how much of “Villon” is a reworking of Villon’s own verse, and how much is Bunting’s. The fact that the fifteenth-century French poet’s images and stories are sometimes indistinguishable from Bunting’s shows where time and contexts overlap, how time repeats itself, and what a contemporary reader might have in common with a medieval one. This is the kind of modernist magic that Bunting, Pound, and Eliot were seeking to make. Villon’s verse is, in this sense, made new—made fit, at least, for a twentieth-century readership.
Despite Share’s efforts, some poems remain obscure: the first part of “Attis,” for example, whose quotations and innuendos are too much of an in-joke to reach a broader audience. Readers won’t suddenly be able to decipher every line building up into an overall “meaning,” but this is just right: Bunting’s poems are not puzzles waiting to be solved. Share quotes Bunting’s letter to Harriet Monroe in 1931: “Ezra says Attis is obscure, from which he deduces that he is getting old. It certainly wouldnt be easy to write a synopsis, but I think it’s really fairly plain for all that, if the reader doesnt spend time and energy looking for a nice logical syllogistic development which isnt there. I dont like formal logic. There are better ways of connecting things up…” The annotations to “The Well of Lycopolis” break new ground, and will provide much relief to a perplexed reader. But there are still obscurities. For example, knowing that Canopus is a star doesn’t help to entirely unpick the line “Windy water slurred the glint of Canopus.” Share writes for a “smart” audience; and though the poems might still leave the reader in the dark in places, it is their job to make connections—to decide, for example, what Daphnis and Chloe have to do with boys with ambiguous faces, treading “between the bedpots.”
A history of Bunting’s reading is also built up over the course of the notes, with Share including possible sources for Bunting’s word choices. Share provides definitions from the Oxford English Dictionary and English Dialect Dictionary when necessary, linking Bunting’s usage of these terms to previous instances of such words and phrases, the sources ranging from poetry to classical philosophy, religious texts, and folk song. For example, on just one page in “The Well of Lycopolis” Share notes: “mansuetude,” “Canopus,” and—my personal favorite—“kecking,” which appeared in Milton before Bunting used it. The “may,” the flower of the hawthorn tree, which falls on the bull’s hide in Briggflatts, appears, Share notes, in Spenser, Jonson, Shelley, Arnold, Longfellow, Pound, Tennyson, and Hopkins. Share reveals just how literary Bunting’s obscure-seeming language is. Share’s tracing of Bunting’s lexis, terminology, and allusions shows that he is not the outlier, eccentric, or regionalist he has sometimes been portrayed as, but a proponent of a far-reaching poetic canon. Lines in Briggflatts’s first part describe a Northumbrian soundscape, as two children hitch a lift on a stonemason’s cart:
Under sacks on the stone
two children lie,
hear the horse stale,
the mason whistle,
harness mutter to shaft,
felloe to axle squeak,
rut thud the rim,
crushed grit.
Share finds examples of “felloe” in the Old English Boethius, Hamlet, George Sandys’s translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, George Chapman’s The Iliad, and Thomas Carlyle’s The French Revolution. “Stale” which means “urinate ” (and not “whinny” as I had previously assumed) is also used by Shakespeare in Antony and Cleopatra, Thomas Hardy in Tess of the d’Urbervilles, and Kipling in “South Africa.” Such notes bear evidence of a long history of poetry and a literary tradition that Bunting is both rooted in and carries forward: the edition thus places him, poetically, among the greats—thoroughly deserved and long overdue.
It is significant in this regard that The Poems of Basil Bunting was published by Faber, ending almost a century of struggle to get a collection of Bunting’s poetry published by the esteemed press. Rumors surround Bunting’s apparent hostility toward Eliot, a poet who, as Share’s volume highlights, is actually more of an influence on Bunting’s work than a hindrance to it. Nevertheless, the story goes that a lifelong antipathy developed between the poets, because, as the poetry editor at Faber, Eliot repeatedly refused to publish Bunting’s work, despite Pound’s support for the younger modernist. Bunting’s letter quoted above to poor Mr. Woodings suggests that he and the press had something of a checkered history. Without disregarding the smaller presses who continue to preserve and proliferate Bunting’s work, it is exciting to see him inhabit the territory of major poets.
Share provides quotations from scholarship on Bunting, too, which is part of what makes the volume so generous. For example, he quotes extensively from Barbara Lesch’s 1979 PhD dissertation, which is difficult to obtain, but contains numerous readings and sources, making some of these quotations from Bunting’s correspondence—often letters to Louis Zukofsky—readily available for the first time. He also reprises Bunting quotations from Victoria Forde’s The Poetry of Basil Bunting (1991); it is timely and useful to look at these again, and Forde’s book is now out of print. It is notable that these two woman scholars of Bunting are quoted regularly throughout Share’s book, helping to show that Bunting studies is not a male-dominated field, despite the masculinism of his work.
I started working on Bunting ten years ago; as I read Share’s book it was clear how much labor this volume will save the scholars starting out on their Bunting journeys. Share preempts our questions, usefully deterring researchers from walking up tempting but blind alleys. For example, Shakespeare’s Sonnet 86 is reworked into “The Well of Lycopolis,” but Share warns us that Sonnet 86 wasn’t one of a number edited down by Bunting as an irreverent demonstration—to Dorothy Pound—of his superior concision. (These appeared posthumously in Sharp Study and Long Toil.) Share has done the groundwork, filled gaps, and anticipated the sorts of scholarship that might be required or desired in the future.
Good conservation is an art, entails craft, and has a philosophy and ethics behind its practice. Editing a volume is an act of conservation, in which the editor must think not only about the value of the poems to future generations, but the meaning, resonances, and implications of the method which they adopt. How will the collection influence readers’ understanding and opinion of the poet now and in the future? What is included and what is left out? How much help should the reader be given? What sort of interventions, even in the form of repairs or corrections, ought to be made, and how do you signal that they are interventions? What effect do interventions have on the story of how the poem came to be the way it is? If a full stop was originally misplaced when the poet was alive and the poem was first published, and that is how the poem is now known, what effect does “correcting” this original mistake have? At what point is a poem complete? What is an original, and does the original matter? Share has evidently carefully considered these concerns. The result is a volume that bolsters Bunting’s position in the canon, introduces readers of his poetry to new aspects of the work, provides a welcome crib to newcomers and a valuable resource to long-term fans, and makes his poetry visible to, and enjoyable for, a wider audience for many generations to come. Share’s work is no mere root around in Bunting’s dustbin: this is an attentive, respectful, and crucial work of conservation.
April 2018