Towards a New Architecture: Basil Bunting's Postwar Reconstruction

This essay examines the postwar trajectory of the British modernist poet Basil Bunting. It combines a close reading of Bunting's long poem The Spoils (1951) with an examination of the contexts that led in the ensuing decade to his defining work Briggflatts (1966), and argues that the decisive moment of Bunting's career occurred during the postwar years, with his discovery of a supportive civic framework in post-war Britain for the production and dissemination of poetry. The article draws on unpublished materials from the Pound-Bunting correspondence at the Beinecke Library, Yale University.