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Article: Versed in adventure.(Complete Poems: Basil Bunting)(Book Review)
- Article from:
- The Nation
- Article date:
- January 3, 2005
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2005 The Nation Company L.P. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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COMPLETE POEMS: Basil Bunting. Edited by Richard Caddel. New Directions. 239 pp. $16.95.
Few modern poets served so long an apprenticeship as Basil Bunting, none had so adventurous a life and few poets' lives have produced such lasting rewards. Along with Philip Larkin (whose partisans often ignore Bunting, and vice versa) Bunting (1900-85) is the major poet of postwar Britain: a master of concision, a superb literary translator, a great lyricist of love and disillusionment, a trustworthy poet of war and of peace, and the author of one of the great long poems in the language.
Though Bunting declared that in poems "sound...is all that matters," readers ...