Basil Bunting on Poetry

Makin has edited these lectures conservatively and sensitively: the speaking voice, with all its asides and modest caveats, has not been excised. With publications as useful and thorough as this, Bunting may yet secure his deserved place on the teaching syllabus of twentieth-century British poetry.

There are many interesting essays here, and all conspire to make one of the most sustained poetic arguments for poetry as a form of music than any I know... Professor Makin and Johns Hopkins have done a valued service in bringing Bunting's readable and provocative prose writings to print.

Carefully and unpedantically edited with scrupulous notes... The book is a fine tribute to Bunting in his centenary year.

These lectures are an engagingly individual and wonderfully readable course of commentaries on the major figures and topics of English poetry. Bunting is at once intensely specialized in matters of poetic craft and delightfully free of specialist jargon and coterie interests. His sensibility is wonderfully accessible to general readers, providing at once the clarity of a seasoned practitioner and a real talent for controversial and provocative opinions.