Thanks for this, Dom. I agree that there are great differences between the
two as well as this intriguing resemblance. Perhaps Old English history was
in the air at the time. I remember a TV play in the 70s called Penda's Fen
by David Rudkin, which took the last pagan king of Mercia as a symbolic
precedent for a sort of historically rooted green anti-authoritarianism. The
play seems dated now, but it really chimed in with the mood at my school. (I
was about 16, and everybody seemed to have seen it and was excited about
it.) So to Hill's Offa and Bunting's Bloodaxe, we can add Rudkin's Penda.
Best wishes
Matthew Francis
[mailto:[log in to unmask]
01443 482856
-----Original Message-----
From: [log in to unmask] [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: 03 May 2000 15:03
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Bunting and Hill
If I could tell you, I would let you know. I think it's reasonable to
assume that Hill at least knows of Bunting, and of Briggflatts, for the
following fairly plausible reasons:
i) Agenda magazine, ed. William Cookson. One of the chief Poundian
outlets, and a long-standing champion of both Bunting and Hill. I
believe you can find a Hill special issue and a Bunting special issue
within a year or so of each other.
ii) Hill's general debt to modernism, actually rather more to Poundian
modernism than to Eliot (says I). Bunting is sometimes positioned as an
inheritor of Poundian modernism, and Hill I think has (or tries to make)
a claim to some part of that inheritance.
In spite of the similarities, and in spite of the fact that Hill is
still my "thing", I'm slightly ashamed to admit that I've only skimmed
Briggflatts and didn't find all that many glaringly obvious similarities
between it and Mercian Hymns, so far as its language, organisation of
themes etc. is concerned. But there's certainly scope for a more
detailed comparison, especially re: myth and history, say.
There's an Agenda "special issue on Myth" I have - Vol. 15, nos 2-3,
Summer-Autumn 1977 - which publishes a letter from Bunting declining to
participate (on the grounds that the word "myth" no longer has a
"tangible" referent since "the Church of E. has now translated [the
Bible] from English into journalese") - alongside seven sections of
Hill's "An Apology For The Revival Of Christian Architecture In
England", that queer and only occasionally lovely meditation on the
etiolation of the national mythos. ("Queer" because it's so difficult to
distinguish the poems' warping-of-nostalgia from the poems'
warped-nostalgia).
I would certainly like very much to hear anybody else's thoughts on
this.
- Dom
"Francis M (HaSS)" wrote:
>
> Can anyone tell me whether the resemblance between Briggflatts and Mercian
> Hymns, both of which combine autobiography with the history of the ruler
of
> a Saxon kingdom, is coincidence? I think Briggflatts was written first -
so
> was Hill influenced by it? I don't remember seeing any comparison between
> the two. But then I haven't read a great deal of criticism on either.
>
> Best wishes
>
> Matthew Francis
> [mailto:[log in to unmask]
> 01443 482856
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