Abstract
This article aims to present new understandings of how place, identity, and text are configured in British modernist poetry, particularly in the extended poem. Focusing chiefly on Basil Bunting’s Briggflatts (1966), the discussion explores this poem’s alignment of geography and history as sources of identity, noting a stark contrast with the kinds of rootlessness more readily associated with the Poundian long poem. Bunting can be seen to marshal a variety of spatio-temporal signifiers to convey a located identity, and it is demonstrated that Hugh MacDiarmid’s A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle (1926) enacts similar processes more explicitly. MacDiarmid and Bunting’s historicized and located writing is briefly contrasted with Louis Zukofsky’s depthless language, which carries conflicting spatial implications. William Carlos Williams’s Paterson is then discussed as representing an American poetics of place that shows key commonalities with Bunting, but works with a distinct conception of history. Ultimately, it is argued that Bunting and MacDiarmid can be viewed as typifying a specifically British modernism, even whilst complicating and interrogating notions of Britishness. Their shared poetics of place are concerned with maintaining roots in the local site, but also asserting Northumbrian and Scottish nationalisms.
Highlights
This article aims to present new understandings of how place, identity, and text are configured in British modernist poetry, in the extended poem
Focusing on Basil Bunting’s Briggflatts (1966), the discussion explores this poem’s alignment of geography and history as sources of identity, noting a stark contrast with the kinds of rootlessness more readily associated with the Poundian long poem
It must be noted that the concept of ‘British modernism’ is used here as a critical convenience to describe these three writers from across the British Isles who typify a poetics of place focused on historicised national identities
Summary
This article aims to present new understandings of how place, identity, and text are configured in British modernist poetry, in the extended poem.
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