The Regional Impersonal as a Mode of Dwelling: Structures of Embodiment in David Jones’s The Anathémata and Basil Bunting’s Briggflatts

Lucie Kotesovska

doi:10.18778/2083-2931.14.15

Authors

Lucie Kotesovska University of Victoria https://orcid.org/0009-0004-1287-2049

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.18778/2083-2931.14.15

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Keywords:

poetic sequence, (neo)modernism, regionalism, impersonality, bard, David Jones, Basil Bunting

Abstract

The discussion of dwelling in this article focuses on T. S. Eliot’s controversial axiom of poetic impersonality as articulated in The Sacred Wood (1920) and practiced in The Waste Land (1922), and on how this axiom is rearticulated by his two younger contemporaries David Jones and Basil Bunting. I argue that in The Anathémata (1952) and Briggflatts (1966), their respective masterpieces, they reintegrate the ego absconditus through their distinct geo-aesthetical self-positioning which gives rise to “the regional impersonal” mode of poetic dwelling. This article explores the complex dialectics between the (neo)modernist claim of impersonality and the affective regional identification of the self-projecting consciousness in the two poems. While sharing Eliot’s regard for the poetic artifact, Jones and Bunting rehabilitate the notion of the poet’s cultural affiliation and representativeness as well as a culturally stimulated consciousness. Their act of self-sublimation is balanced by the material and sensual anchor of their regional allegiance. Further, the Eliotean fissure between the mind that experiences and suffers and the mind that creates resulting in a cascading multiplicity of voices in The Waste Land, is healed in Jones’s and Bunting’s poetic nostos and active mode of dwelling. Also, by giving resonance to numerous names and voices, mostly disembodied and obliterated entities, Jones’s and Bunting’s poetics introduces unifying strategies of impersonation reflecting their definite geo-cultural positioning. Eliot’s original aporia is thus not resolved but re-inhabited.

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Author Biography

Lucie Kotesovska, University of Victoria

Lucie Kotesovska is a PhD candidate in English and sessional instructor at the University of Victoria. In her research, she focuses mainly on the spiritual motivation behind modernist experiment and on British and Irish poetry of the 20^th and 21^st centuries. She has published, for instance, on the narrative passion in Ford Madox Ford’s Good Soldier, the uneasy presence of notes in modernist poetry, and Seamus Heaney’s transcendental turn in “Squarings.” In her proposed dissertation, she addresses the renegotiation between worlds private and public through lyric agency in modern Irish poetry focusing on work by Seamus Heaney, Eavan Boland, Derek Mahon and Paula Meehan.

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