Basil Bunting, 1900-1985

Basil Bunting's poetry is deeply rooted in the landscape, history, language and culture of his native Northumbria, where he spent his youth, and to which he returned for the last three decades of his life. A close friend of Ezra Pound and Louis Zukovsky, he was associated in the thirties with the American Objectivist poets. In the fifties and early sixties his work suffered a period of eclipse, but his reputation was re-established by the publication in 1965 of his long poem Briggflatts .

Principal pamphlets and books of poems: Redimiculum matellarum (1930), Poems 1950 (1950), The spoils (1965), First book of odes (1965), Loquitur (1965), Briggflatts (1966), Two poems (1967), What the chairman told Tom (1967), Collected poems (1968, later eds with additional material 1970, 1978, 1985), Selected poems of Joseph Skipsey, ed. Basil Bunting (1976), Complete poems (1994).

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