Sunday Feature: Briggflatts - A Northern Poetic Odyssey

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Briggflatts - A Northern Poetic Odyssey

BBC Radio 3 - Sunday Feature, Briggflatts - A Northern Poetic Odyssey

Rory Stewart in search of Basil Bunting’s neglected masterpiece about love, loss and time.

Rory Stewart in search of Bunting’s neglected masterpiece about love, loss and time. Its publication in 1966 turned the shy Northumbrian into an international poetry phenomenon.

Rory Stewart travels across Cumbria and Northumbria from an ancient Quaker meeting house in Brigflatts, to a medieval tower on Newcastle city walls, in search of clues in Basil Bunting's life and work, to help understand this neglected masterpiece of twentieth century modernist poetry .

It's a landscape which the former MP for Penrith and the Borders came to know and love, and it's where Bunting's poetic masterpiece is largely set. Bunting called it his ‘acknowledged land’, an area stretching from Scotland to the Humber, which was once the ancient kingdom of Northumbria. 

A moment in time during the Dark Ages which saw a flourishing of Northumbrian art and culture, which produced the Lindisfarne Gospels, and was populated by larger than life historical figures like Eric Bloodaxe and Saint Cuthbert.

It’s a complex poem, which is not in the least parochial, taking in the poets travels around the world and his wide learning, and it has much in common with the modernist poetry of Eliot's Waste Land and Pounds Cantos. Briggflatts popularity spear headed a Sixties' north-eastern poetry renaissance, and yet in its homeland its been criticised for not being written in an authentic regional voice.

Rory examines the many contradictions in Bunting's life, the conscientious objector who later served in the RAF, the socialist who had fascist friends, and the principled public man who led an unexamined private life.

But Rory leaves his journey with an acknowledgement of Bunting's exceptional poetic skill and the way in which his life weaves into the life of Northern England with all its complexity and fierce rooted national pride.

Produced by Andrew Carter at BBC Radio Cumbria

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