Basil Bunting

Poet, born in Scotswood, Northumberland, NE England, UK. He worked as a journalist in Paris, was much influenced by Pound and the American Modernists, and published his early poetry abroad. After some years in Paris, where he worked on translation, he returned to Britain and established his reputation with Briggflatts (1966), a semi-autobiographical poem deeply rooted in the North East.

Basil Cheesman Bunting (March 3, 1900 – April 17, 1985) was a British modernist poet.

Bunting was born in Scotswood-on-Tyne, Northumberland, now part of Newcastle upon Tyne, and educated at the Royal Grammar School there for two years. He then studied at two Quaker schools: from 1912–1916 at Ackworth School in Yorkshire, and from 1916–1918 at Leighton Park School in Berkshire..

During the early 1920s, he became friendly with Ezra Pound who dedicated his Guide to Kulchur to Bunting and Louis Zukofsky, and his early poetry was to show the influence of this friendship.

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 Teheran 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, who were interested in working with the Modernist tradition.