Basil Bunting's late modernism : from Pound to poetic community

This study examines Basil Bunting's development as a poet from his meeting with Ezra Pound in Paris in 1923, through his collaborations with Pound, Louis Zukofsky, and other members of the Objectivist circle in the 1930s, up to his meeting with Allen Ginsberg and Tom Pickard in 1960s Britain against a backdrop of social activism and modernist revival. In particular, it seeks to query the critical commonplace that Bunting was a sceptic interested solely in the autotelic form of poetry, and to argue that his revival at the time of the long poem Briggflatts in the sixties should be read historically - as a case study that shows the Poundian tradition of praxis and orality acquiring a newly communitarian, leftist emphasis in the context of post-war Anglo-American poetry. The study draws extensively on unpublished manuscripts and letters held at the Basil Bunting Archive, Durham University, the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas (Austin), and the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.