Basil Bunting

Shadingfield

Wylam

Northumberland

25 September 1975

Dear Mr Davie

Thankyou for getting Mr Woodings to send me your Fontana book on Pound. I've enjoyed reading it.

Concerning a sentence or two about me: I would not repudiate
anything you say there about Brissflatts; yet I think you and
other critics sometimes forget that other poets besides Dante
can bundle two or three different meanings into a sentence on
occasion. The meanings you have read were in my mind, but were
not those which determined the choice of words. That doesn't
matter, and I'm sorry to have felt obliged to say even that little
about myself.

There is another paragraph which I have failed to understand.
Perhaps age makes me dense. You seem to have written that it
might be said of large-scale and small-scale rhythms that 'none of
them come home to us'. Rhythm is surely a perfectly concrete
phenomenon, however evanescent - air, waves of it, bumping
one's ear-drum - and must come home to anyone within hearing
distance who has his ears open.

But for the book as whole, it is certainly one of the best
about Pound: and possibly because you are a skilful poet yourself
you do perceive and may make some of your readers perceive that
the essence of the Cantos, at least, lies in their rhythms. Perhaps
they are combined on musical models rather more consciously than
you seem to allow. He and I discussed such matters a good deal about
1930, and I have no doubt at all that Walt Whitman's practice in
a few poems such as 'Out of the cradle, endlessly rocking' first
set Pound to combine, repeat, modify, rhythmic themes much as a
good XIXc composer does.

I won't make points. No doubt the employees of what you call
the Pound industry, which I detest, are hurrying to tell you all
your errors and omissions, particularly those which are quite
irrelevant to what you have to say. There's no stopping them.
However, towards the end of the book you advance the notion that
the excuse for poetry and the reason for writing it is the pleasure
it gives. That's a much more general proposition, and one I don't
want to let pass without dissent.

Telephone

06-614-3255

So that Brissflatts is a Quaker poem, the centre of which -
Alexander's meeting with the angel on the mountain top - is the
rejection of what is usually reckoned as success and as
consistency. But it's not a piece of theology or philosophy.
It's reason for existence is only to be a poem.

I must apologise for thrusting all this on you. You must
blame your own lack of caution in asking the question.

For the rest, your letter is most courteous and even flattering.
Thankyou.