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The Yale Journal of Criticism 13.1 (2000) 49-66



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Regionalism and Internationalism in Basil Bunting's Briggflatts

Burton Hatlen


This essay represents an extended variation on a theme by Hugh MacDiarmid:

I rejoice in André Chamson's description
Of the upsurge of his native langue d'oc
Against the pressure to 'talk French.'

This renewed impetus
     Towards the local and the vernacular
    Implies a changing conception of culture,
        No longer a hothouse growth but rooted.
        If all the world went native
        There would be a confusion of tongues,
        A multiplication of regionalisms.
        Partikularismus, however,
        Is hostile to nationalism
And friendly to internationalism.1

Regionalism, nationalism, internationalism. These are the three variables that I would like to set into motion in this essay. I will overlay this triad of terms borrowed from MacDiarmid with another pair of terms, borrowed from the social sciences: "center" and "periphery." Economic and political centers, sociologists like Stein Rokkan have argued, exercise various kinds of political and economic control over peripheral regions or countries: thus, for example, the hegemony which the United States exercises over Latin America and Canada, or Britain/France/Germany over the Scandinavian countries; or, within established political boundaries, Boston over New England, or the South of England over the North. 2 I will here be interested primarily in questions of cultural hegemony. How does the culture of the center--the capital (usually) within the nation-state, the dominant nation or language within a region--affect cultural life on the periphery? And what is the relationship between such center/periphery tensions and the "internationalism" of which MacDiarmid speaks?

I invoke these large abstractions as a way into the poetry of Basil Bunting, in particular Briggflatts. For at least during his later years, Bunting insisted that he was not an "English" poet at all, but a Northumbrian poet. 3 I am interested in Bunting's claim to such a regional identity because it suggests that he was acutely aware of the tension between center and periphery in British cultural life, and that he defined his own poetic project--as did, in a different way, MacDiarmid himself--as a challenge [End Page 49] to the center, in the name of a suppressed culture of the periphery. In 1954, for example, Bunting wrote to Dorothy Pound, "Our only hope for our children is to destroy uniformity, centralisation, big states and big factories and give men a chance to vary and live without more interference than it is the nature of their neighbours to insist on." 4 And Stefan Hawlin has demonstrated that in his late short poem, "At Briggflatts Meeting House," Bunting "places himself against the power of the centre in a relaxed and insouciant way, knowing the sureness of his ground." 5

At the same time, however, Bunting was an international poet to a degree rare among the British poets of our century: a disciple of Ezra Pound, a friend and ally of Louis Zukofsky, a student and translator of Persian poetry, a resident for extended periods of France, Italy, the United States, the Canary Islands, and Iran. My goal in this essay will be to explore the meaning both of Bunting's regionalism and of his internationalism, and to consider some of the ways in which his regionalist and internationalist loyalties represent an alternative to nationalism. In doing so I shall focus on Briggflatts; and I shall here read this great poem specifically as an American reader, for I believe my location as a reader can bring into focus some of the ways in which Bunting's poem speaks out of a specific geographic place. 6 I shall begin by looking at the language of the poem, for it is in the words of the poem that, as Bunting himself says, "Then is diffused in Now," 7 and that Northumbria must come into being, if it is to exist at all. In the second section I shall argue that in Briggflatts Bunting not only seeks to recover a Northumbrian homeland but also proposes a specific interpretation of this homeland, poetic/erotic rather...

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