Cosmic Global Medieval Sound in Northumbrian Late-Modernist Verse: Boethius, Dante, and Musica Mundana in Basil Bunting's Briggflatts: An Autobiography (1966)

The obscure yet lauded late-modernist Northumbrian poet Basil Bunting claimed the meaning of his poetry is the sound. To form the soundscape of his magnum opus, Briggflatts: an Autobiography (1966), Bunting weaves a global medieval network of poets to create a simultaneously regional and transnational sound. His virtuosity in prosody spans across temporal and linguistic bounds—from the Classical Persian verse of Ferdowsi and Hafiz, to the Latin and Greek quantitative meters of Horace and Catullus, to Old Norse skaldic poets, to the versification of medieval Western European giants of vernacular poetry, Chaucer and Dante (Pople 56). Bunting’s diachronic and global prosodic scope is most resonant and consciously deployed in his five-section, more-than-seven-hundred line poem that recounts his reckoning with a life misspent on attempts to control fate—waging war and squandering love. This thesis assesses the critical influence of Boethius and Dante Alighieri in shaping the sound and cosmological structure of Bunting’s long poem. This analysis explores the questions: How does the sonic medium of poetry condense complex theoretical paradigms across time, and to what extent does it do that differently in its aural and textual forms? How does engagement with medieval poetic sound in twentieth-century poetics transform its temporality? Does it collapse or dilate time? Does it clarify or obscure poetic meaning?

Divided into two sections, this thesis first conducts a review of relevant unique biographical circumstance and surveys prior literary criticism across the disciplines of modernism, medievalism, and medieval modernism to illuminate why this celebrated poet has remained obscure in scholarship. The second section is dedicated to closely reading how the musical cosmological concept of Boethian musica mundana (and its afterlife as the divine love that moves the sun and other stars in Dante’s Divine Comedy) manifests throughout the sonic structure of Briggflatts. This thesis argues for diachronic close reading practices that transcend the confines of epistemic boundaries that a synchronic close reading practice may enforce.