The work of Basil Bunting refutes the longheld contention that modernism is an exclusively American phenomenon which began on British soil. Integrally connected with Ezra Pound, this movement in poetry began in England in 1908. Not only does the form of Bunting's poetry show a similarity in its lucidity and spareness with Pound's and that of other modernists such as T. S. Eliot, but the themes with which it concerns itself are typical of those associated with modernism. Bunting was first attracted to Pound's and Eliot's work in 1919 because he felt that he shared with them a concern with adapting music to poetry. In fact, Bunting suggests that his only unique contribution to poetry is his adaptation of the sonata form to a poetic structure.

At the very core of Bunting's approach to life is an acceptance of many of the tenets of Quakerism which he learned as a...