Time and the Literary past in the Poetry of Basil Bunting

Abstract

The whole of the upbringing of Basil Bunting (born 1900) and many of the influences on his life prepared him to be profoundly conscious of literature and the literary past. Bunting's father was a doctor who had wide literary interests. Basil Bunting remembers how he used to read Wordsworth's poems aloud to the family.1 Through his home background, his father's extensive library, and his education at the Quaker schools of Ackworth and Leyton Park, he came to have a very wide culture, with a feeling for literature and a gift for languages which have never left him. It was during his youth that he came to know Spenser, Wyatt, Villon, Malherbe, Dante, and the classics of Greek and Latin literature, especially Homer and Lucretius.2 This culture was not entirely literary. Basil Bunting's aunt was a concert pianist, and it was because of hearing her play that he first formed his love of music. As a boy he used to ask her to play Scarlatti sonatas to him-an early sign of his interest in that particular musical form and in that composer. Bunting travelled widely, and it was during a period of a few months in 1923, spent as sub-editor to Ford Madox Ford on the short-lived transatlantic review, that he met Ezra Pound. It can safely