Sunday Feature: Briggflatts - A Northern Poetic Odyssey

Inspired by Basil Bunting's epic poem Briggflatts, Rory Stewart travels across Cumbria and Northumbria from an ancient Quaker meeting house to a medieval tower on Newcastle city walls in search of clues in Bunting's life and work to help understand this neglected masterpiece of 20th-century modernist poetry. It's a landscape which the former MP for Penrith and the Borders came to know and love, and it's where Bunting's poetic masterpiece is largely set. Bunting called it his 'acknowledged land', an area stretching from Scotland to the Humber, which was once the ancient kingdom of Northumbria. A moment in time during the Dark Ages which saw a flourishing of Northumbrian art and culture, which produced the Lindisfarne Gospels, and was populated by larger than life historical figures like Eric Bloodaxe and St Cuthbert. It's a complex poem, which is not in the least parochial, taking in the poets travels around the world and his wide learning, and it has much in common with the modernist poetry of Eliot's Waste Land and Pounds Cantos. Briggflatts popularity spearheaded a Sixties' north-eastern poetry renaissance, and yet in its homeland it's been criticised for not being written in an authentic regional voice. Rory examines the many contradictions in Bunting's life, the conscientious objector who later served in the RAF, the socialist who had fascist friends, and the principled public man who led an unexamined private life. But Rory leaves his journey with an acknowledgement of Bunting's exceptional poetic skill and the way in which his life weaves into the life of northern England with all its complexity and fierce rooted national pride