The Star You Steer By: Basil Bunting and British Modernism

This book explores Basil Bunting’s continued reputation and influence in contemporary British poetry, and also the impact of a peculiarly ‘Northern’ inflection of Modernism which Bunting largely defined. English, Scottish, Welsh and American poets and academics reflect upon the impact or example of Bunting’s work in the centenary year of his birth, looking back to the beginnings of Modernism into which he was born, or forward into the twenty-first century in which he continues to be learned from. Topics covered include the nature of influence; Celtic and Northumbrian contexts for the modern English long poem; prosodic patterns in early Bunting; Bunting in performance; his narrative sources; the problem of patronage; his ‘rueful masculinity’; women poets and Bunting; radical landscape poetry; his translations from the Persian Hafiz and the Roman Horace; economic and social tensions in his work; the poet as ‘makar’; and a selection of previously unpublished letters from the 1960s to the 1980s, commenting upon poetry and on the political condition of Britain in those years.