"Basil Cheesman Bunting" was a significant United Kingdom/British modernist poetry/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.

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The mystic purchases a moment of exhilaration with a lifetime of confusion; and the confusion is infectious and destructive. It is confusing and destructive to try and explain anything in terms of anything else, poetry in terms of psychology.

183

I hate Science. It denies a man's responsibility for his own deeds, abolishes the brotherhood that springs from God's fatherhood. It is a hectoring, dictating expertise, which makes the least lovable of the Church Fathers seem liberal by contrast.

177

But their determination to banish fools foundered ultimately in the installation of absolute idiots.

162

To appreciate present conditions, collate them with those of antiquity.

153

Whether you listen to a piece of music, or a poem, or look at a picture or a jug, or a piece of sculpture, what matters about it is not what it has in common with others of its kind, but what is singularly its own.

129

Sooner or later we must absorb Islam if our own culture is not to die of anemia.

83

Can a moment of madness make up for an age of consent?

78