How minor is minor? ‘Rings a bell’ was more or less the response of two English literature graduates, now successful fifty-somethings, when asked what the name Basil Bunting meant to them. It is, after all, a good name, a memorable name. I asked a younger friend, about to start his Eng. Lit. degree at Keble: ‘Nothing.’ I asked a former literary publicist: ‘No, nothing.’ I quizzed a chap from the FCO: ‘Nothing, I’m afraid. Sorry.’
Perhaps not deep research, but I’d be surprised if Basil Bunting’s work was familiar to anyone not a poet or scholar of English modernism. Is this as it should be? Does he deserve a 600-page biography (any more than any other minor poet)? As a matter of fact he does.
Tehran, 1951, the Ritz. A mob is outside shouting for Bunting’s life. Bunting wrote that he ‘walked into the crowd and stood amongst them and shouted DEATH TO MR BUNTING! with the best of them.’
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