At last in print, the complete poems of the great Northumbrian poet--admired by Pound, Yeats, and Zukofsky--containing his masterwork Briggflatts.

"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 A close poetic ally of Ezra Pound and Louis Zukofsky, the British poet Basil Bunting is best known for his use of specific musical form in poetry. Several of his works, including his long poem Briggflatts, are in the form of the sonata. Although his language is plain, unvarnished English, his influences and models extend to Classical, Persian, and Japanese verse. Basil Bunting on Poetry collects two series of lectures that Bunting delivered in 1968 and 1974. Tracing the development of an English poetry governed by families of stress-groups from Beowulf down to Wyatt, Wordsworth, Whitman, Pound, and Zukofsky, the lectures focus on writing and hearing poetry rather than on literary-historical concerns. Throughout, editor Peter Makin expands upon and annotates the lectures with additional comments drawn from Bunting's writings.

Basil Bunting's work was published haphazardly throughout most of his life, and in many cases he did not oversee publication. This is the first critical edition of the complete poems, and offers an accurate text with variants from all printed sources. Don Share annotates Bunting's often complex and allusive verse, with much illuminating quotation from his prose writings, interviews and correspondence. He also examines Bunting's use of sources (including Persian literature and classical mythology), and explores the Northumbrian roots of Bunting's poetic vocabulary and use of dialect.

Basil Bunting did not 'believe in biography'. He used to assert that his great poem Briggflatts was his autobiography, and that nothing else was worth saying. He had scant respect for critics, and gave little away about his life - or misled his would-be biographers, whose accounts of him were often semi-mythical. But Bunting's real life does read like an adventure story. Born in Northumberland in 1900, he lived in Paris in the twenties, where Ezra Pound rescued him from jail and fixed him up with a job on the Transatlantic Review. In 1923 he followed Pound to Italy - giving up his job to Hemingway - where Yeats knew him as 'one of Pound's more savage disciples'. For the next thirty years he led a sometimes wild and always varied life, in Italy, England, Berlin, Tenerife, America and Persia, as a struggling, penniless writer, a music critic, sea captain, RAF officer, Times correspondent and Chief of Political Intelligence in Teheran. During these years he built up a reputation in America as the best English poet of his generation, at the same time as his poetry was neglected in Britain. It was not until the publication of Briggflatts in 1966 that his genius was finally recognised.He was in his seventies when he first met the American critic Sister Victoria Forde, who was working on a study of music and meaning in his poetry. They continued to meet and correspond, and his comments and answers to her letters now form an integral part of the book which grew out of her academic research. This is the first critical study of Bunting's poetry. It is a brilliantly researched book drawing upon the work and letters of Bunting and his contemporaries, as well as interviews and correspondence with his family, and includes over thirty previously unpublished photographs of and by Bunting taken throughout his life.

Edited by Don Share, this slim anthology collects Basil Bunting's translations from Persian poetry by Rudaki, Ferdowsi, Manuchehri, Sa'di, Hafiz, and Obaid-e Zakani, including some that are previously unpublished. Bunting, who is widely regarded as one of the most important British poets of the twentieth century, proved unusual in his deep and abiding interest in Middle Eastern culture. Here, he renders poetry of remarkable tonal and emotional range in characteristically clear and resolute language.

"Early in the twentieth century, Americans and other English-speaking nations began to regard adolescence as a separate phase of life. Associated with uncertainty, inwardness, instability, and sexual energy, adolescence acquired its own tastes, habits, subcultures, slang, economic interests, and art forms." "The first comprehensive study of adolescence in twentieth-century poetry, The Forms of Youth recasts the history of how English-speaking cultures began to view this phase of life as a valuable state of consciousness, if not the very essence of a Western identity."--BOOK JACKET.