Basil Bunting's 'Now there's no hope of going back'

Basil Bunting (1900-1985)

This poem makes an interesting contrast with Louise MacNeice’s Thalassa. The poet may be an experienced sailor (Bunting was) and he may be talking to his boat, but there’s a sense of defeat here lacking in MacNeice’s poem.

The epigraph to this poem is ‘Perche no Spero’, because there is no hope, which I left out of the reading for no other reason than I forgot to read it.

Basil Bunting's 'What the Chairman Told Tom'.

Basil Bunting (1900-1985)

Nasty little words, nasty long words,
it's unhealthy.
I want to wash when I meet a poet.

They're Reds, addicts, 
all delinquents.
What you write is rot.

You can enjoy this poem as a joke, or as a caricature of a very common attitude towards poetry. It’s not work in the way being a bus conductor is work, and if the ten year old son can do it and rhyme, and the school teacher thinks that the poetry isn’t good, after all, school teachers know about this stuff, what claim does the poet have to any type of excellence, let alone any financial reward.

But beyond the grim humour is something else. The issue of public funding for the arts, and poetry especially. The Chairman, for all his bluster, has a point, or a series of points. And if instead of dismissing him as an uneducated and unsympathetic whatever, you try and refute or answer his points, you might find the exercise not as straight forward as it seems.

I’ve always assumed the Tom In Question is Tom Pickard, but I have no evidence to support that.

This is taken from the excellent Bloodaxe edition of Bunting’s Complete Poems.

Basil Buntings' 'Villon'

Basil Bunting (1900-1985) is one of the great English poets of the 20th century. Briggflatts, which for many people is the poem that substantiates that claim was written at the end of a long writing life, and tends to overshadow his earlier poems.

Villon is the first of his ‘sonatas’, the name he gave to his longer poems. Published when he was in his mid twenties, it tangles his interest in Villon the medieval poet with his own experiences in gaol as a conscientious objector and his more recent run in with the French police.