Free of our humbug: notes on Basil Bunting.

All through my twenties I read Basil Bunting with a kind of avid awe. The sounds and forms of his poems seemed to me at once remote and exemplary, too singular to learn from in any direct way, perhaps, and yet guiding examples nonetheless. I loved the aural imperative of the verse, which you hear before you understand, or which, in a sense, to hear is to understand. I loved the dense textures, the sculpted syllables, the way the lines seem almost to bristle with contempt for anything extraneous or merely ornamental. Most of all, I loved the way you can feel the form of this poetry, over large stretches of verse, the way it accretes without losing precision, is in some ...