Strong Song Tows Us

A biography of poet Basil Bunting.

Basil Bunting, Britain's greatest modernist poet, led an extraordinary life. He was born in 1900 in a small mining village in Tyneside, where he received a largely Quaker education and, at the age of thirteen, met the love of his life. His young life was hindered after he left school and went straight to prison as a conscientious objector. In the early twenties he worked in Paris as, variously, an artist's model and road mender, before being rescued from another strech in prison by Ezra Pound and Ford Madox Ford. Later the young poet found himself with Pound and W. B. Yeats in Rapallo where he worked on sand boats and wrote the poems that formed the backbone of Pound's influential Active Anthology. Bunting continued to move from place to place for the rest of his life. He and his young family fled their Canary Island home at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, and the breakdown of his marriage saw him take residence on a boat off the south coast of England. During the Second World War he took advantage of his knowledge of classical Persian to work as a translator in Iraq. He later became a spy in the region, culminating in promotion to Vice Consul in Isfahan. His time as The Times Middle East correspondent was cut short when he was thrown out of Iran by Mossadeq in 1953. Briggflatts caught the literary world's attention, but fame brought him no relief from grinding poverty and he died at the age of 85, impoverished but with a lasting poetic legacy. This book tells a captivating tale of action, adventure and lasting friendships. We meet some of the finest writers of the last century, including Yeats, Pound, T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams and Louis Zukofsky.