Basil Bunting

Basil Cheesman Bunting (March 3, 1900 – April 17, 1985) was a British modernist poet.

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On Poetry

• All you can usually say about a poem or a picture is, 'Look at it, listen to it.' Whether you listen to a piece of music or a poem, or look at a picture or a jug or a piece of sculpture, what matters about it is not what it has in common with others of its kind, but what is singularly its own."
  • Basil Bunting on Poetry ed Peter Makin,The Johns Hopkins University Press; New edition (1 Oct 2003) ISBN 978-0801877506

Gin the Goodwife Stint, from Odes I:14 (1930)

• Gin the goodwife stint
  and the bairns hunger
  the Duke can get his rent
  one year longer.
• The Duke can get his rent
  and we can get our ticket
  twa pund emigrant
  on a C.P.R. packet.

What The Chairman Told Tom, from Odes II:6 (1965)

• Poetry? It's a hobby.
  I run model trains.
  Mr Shaw there breeds pigeons.
  It's not work. You don't sweat.
  Nobody pays for it.
  You could advertise soap.
• Who says it's poetry, anyhow?
  My ten year old
  can do it and rhyme.
  Mr Hines says so, and he's a schoolteacher,
  he ought to know.
  Go and find work

External links

• Basil Bunting Poetry Centre
• Basil Bunting's Grave
• Basil Bunting Home Page at EPC, Buffalo
• At Briggflatts Meetinghouse recording read by the author
• Minor Poet, Not Conspicuously Dishonest Richard Caddel's Introduction to Complete Poems
• Review of Complete Poems