Skeltonic prosody in Basil Bunting's Briggflatts

Abstract

As arguably the most important long poem of the latter half of the twentieth century, Basil Bunting's Briggflatts has invited no small number of critical considerations, investigations, and explications. It is, in fact, a poem whose very substance would seem to call out for some form of elucidation, despite – or perhaps in part because of – its author's staunch refusal to reveal much more about the structure and meaning of his magnum opus than that its composition was informed by some combination of Scarlatti's B minor fugato and the illuminations of the obscure Lindisfarne Gospels, and that Briggflatts’ text, moreover, could best and only properly be understood for its ‘music’. Just what Bunting's ‘music' was, and exactly how that music should be heard, has remained something of a mystery. A close consideration of Bunting's strong ties to sixteenth-century music and poetics, however, reveals a prosodic agenda both whose substance and whose yield in Bunting's practice uncannily resemble those of the Tudor court poet John Skelton and his highly idiosyncratic prosodic approach, now known eponymously as Skeltonics. Although Bunting was demonstrably familiar with Skelton's work, the extent to which his engagement with the Skeltonic tradition in Briggflatts was totally self-conscious remains unclear. What is beyond doubt, however, is that Bunting's abandonment of Puttenhamian verse in favour of tight textual ‘condensations' of rhythm, rhyme, and alliteration enabled him to achieve Briggflatts – arguably the very greatest of Skeltonic works.