Basil Bunting Basil Cheesman Bunting ( 1 March 1900 – 17 April 1985 ) was a significant British modernist poet whose reputation was established with the publication of " Briggflatts " in 1966 . He had a lifelong interest in music that led him to emphasise the sonic qualities of poetry , particularly the importance of reading poetry aloud . He was an accomplished reader of his own work , and a born modernist . Life and career . Born into a Quaker family in Scotswood - on - Tyne , Northumberland ( now part of Newcastle upon Tyne ) , he studied at two Quaker schools : from 1912 – 1916 at Ackworth School in Yorkshire and from 1916 – 1918 at Leighton Park School in Berkshire . His Quaker education strongly influenced his pacifist opposition to World War I , and in 1918 he was arrested as a conscientious objector having been refused recognition by the tribunals and refusing to comply with a notice of call - up . Handed over to the military , he was court - martialled for refusing to obey orders , and served a sentence of more than a year in Wormwood Scrubs and Winchester prison s . Bunting ' s friend Louis Zukofsky described him as a " conservative / anti - fascist / imperialist " , though Bunting himself listed the major influences on his artistic and personal outlook somewhat differently as " Jails and the sea , Quaker mysticism and socialist politics , a lasting unlucky passion , the slums of Lambeth and Hoxton . . . " These events were to have an important role in his first major poem , " Villon " ( 1925 ) . " Villon " was one of a rather rare set of complex structured poems that Bunting labelled " sonatas , " thus underlining the sonic qualities of his verse and recalling his love of music . Other “ sonatas ” include “ Attis : or , Something Missing , ” “ Aus Dem Zweiten Reich , ” “ The Well of Lycopolis , ” “ The Spoils ” and , finally , “ Briggflatts . ” After his release from prison in 1919 , traumatised by the time spent there , Bunting went to London , where he enrolled in the London School of Economics , and had his first contacts with journalists , social activists and Bohemia . Bunting was introduced to the works of Ezra Pound by Nina Hamnett who lent him a copy of " Homage to Sextus Propertius " . The glamour of the cosmopolitan modernist examples of Nina Hamnett and Mina Loy seems to have influenced Bunting in his later move from London to Paris . After travelling in Northern Europe , Bunting left the London School of Economics without a degree and went to France . There , in 1923 , he became friendly with Ezra Pound , who years later would dedicate his " Guide to Kulchur " ( 1938 ) to both Bunting and Louis Zukofsky , " strugglers in the desert " . Bunting ' s poetry began to show the influence of this friendship and he visited Pound in Rapallo , Italy , and later settled there with his family from 1931 to 1933 . He was published in the Objectivist issue of " Poetry " magazine , in the " Objectivist Anthology " , and in Pound ' s " Active Anthology " . During World War II , Bunting served in British Military Intelligence in Persia . After the war , he continued to serve on the British Embassy staff in Tehran until he was expelled by Muhammad Mussadegh in 1952 . Back in Newcastle , he worked as a journalist on the " Evening Chronicle " until his rediscovery during the 1960s by young poets , notably Tom Pickard and Jonathan Williams , who were interested in working in the modernist tradition . In 1965 , he published his major long poem , " Briggflatts " , named for the Quaker meeting house in Cumbria where he is now buried . In later life he published " Advice to Young Poets " entitled I SUGGEST advising ' Compose aloud : poetry is a sound ' . Bunting died in 1985 in Hexham , Northumberland . Briggflatts . Divided into five parts , " Briggflatts " is a kind of poetic autobiography , looking back on teenage love and on Bunting ' s involvement in the high modernist period . In addition , " Briggflatts " can be read as a meditation on the limits of life and a celebration of Northumbrian culture and dialect , as symbolised by events and figures like the doomed Viking King Eric Bloodaxe . The critic Cyril Connolly was among the first to recognise the poem ' s value , describing it as " the finest long poem to have been published in England since T . S . Eliot ' s " Four Quartets " " . Portrait bust of Basil Bunting . Basil Bunting sat in Northumberland for sculptor Alan Thornhill with a resulting terracotta ( for bronze ) in existence . The correspondence file relating to the Bunting portrait bust is held as part of the Thornhill Papers ( 2006 : 56 ) in the archive of the Henry Moore Foundation ' s Henry Moore Institute in Leeds and the terracotta remains in the collection of the artist .