With the publication of Briggflatts in 1965, Basil Bunting secured his reputation as a poet. That a modernist innovator in the Objectivist / Poundian tradition should be largely identified with a single project is not unusual, as Ezra Pound's Cantos and Louis Zukofsky's "A" demonstrate. However, the earlier poems of Pound and Zukofsky have not been neglected to the same extent as Bunting's work of the 1920s, '30s and '40s. This critical neglect is especially apparent with regard to Bunting's First Book of Odes, which contains thirty-seven of his shorter poems written between 1924 and 1949. Perhaps the most thorough formal analysis of these poems appears in Victoria Marie Forde's chapter in Basil Bunting: Man and Poet, in which she downplays their importance by suggesting "that these brief odes are not comparable to the poet's longer, more important poems" (126). In this paper, I will proceed with the contrasting conviction that the First Book of Odes contains some of Bunting's finest verse, and that-as I have argued elsewhere- ¹   the emphasis on the materiality of language in these poems makes them emblematic of Objectivist craft in general.

      Part of the intrinsic interest of Bunting's First Book of Odes lies in its extended time of composition. Both in the world and in Bunting's personal life, much changed during those twenty-five years, and by the time the Odes appeared in the collection Poems: 1950-published by a small press in Galveston,Texas-Bunting's politics and his poetic values had undergone revision. Like his Objectivist contemporaries, Bunting had used his poetry of the 1920s and mid-1930s as a vehicle to protest specific social and economic injustices. But this political dimension of his work fell away in the late '30s and '40s, as he attempted to balance his patriotic response to World War II, his commitment to modernist poetic experimentation, and his complicated relationship with Pound, whose association with Italian Fascism placed Bunting "from strong personal commitment on the other side from his former mentor" (Alldritt 79). This uneasy balance of nationalism, modernist craft and loyalty to Pound plays out in the Odes of the late '30s and '40s as a rarified aestheticism and a heightened interest in the reception of art by later generations. For Bunting, then, the craft of poetry gradually becomes formalist, apolitical and monumental, and in this context personal and political loyalties seem a secondary concern; thus, the painful fact of Pound's fascism is mitigated in the Odes by the sheer aesthetic value of Pound's literary achievement.

      The poems in the First Book of Odes vary in topic from meditations on time, nature, craft and love to direct, localized political protests. In 1930, Bunting wrote several of his most political poems: ode "14," titled "Gin the Goodwife Stint," and ode "18," "The Complaint of the Morpethshire Farmer." Written in the Northumbrian dialect, both poems directly confront social injustice in Northern England (Forde 130-131). In "Gin the Goodwife Stint," Bunting contrasts the greed of a landholding duke with the hard work of the rural poor. In "The Complaint of the Morpethshire Farmer"-which echoes several of Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads-a destitute farmer laments the loss of his sheep and the untended state of his land. As a result of his misfortunes, the farmer is forced to move his family to Canada, the naturally barren condition of which is contrasted with a Northumbrian barrenness produced by greed and economic injustice:

Canada's a bare land
for the north wind and the snow.
Northumberland's a bare land
for men have made it so.

Sheep and cattle are poor men's food,
grouse is sport for the rich;
heather grows where the sweet grass might grow
for the cost of cleaning the ditch (113).

      With the outbreak of World War II, a radical change occurred in Bunting's life. Raised as a Quaker, Bunting had been a conscientious objector to the First World War and had even been imprisoned for a time. But the forty-year-old poet had a far different response to the Second World War: he enlisted in the British Royal Air Force (RAF). Keith Alldritt has argued that Bunting's willingness to serve was predicated as much on his need for a job as it was on his anti-fascist sentiments (Spy 97). In any case, Bunting went rapidly from an underemployed sailor in Los Angeles to various positions with the RAF, including work on a reconnaissance balloon off the Scottish coast, several stints as a truck driver, a position as an interpreter in Iran, and a prestigious post as an intelligence officer in Italy (Alldritt, Spy 97-106). The extent to which this military service affected Bunting's thinking about aesthetics is apparent in a humorous yet unsettling letter he wrote to Louis Zukofsky during the war. "What do 'I feel with a machine-gun?'," Bunting wrote. "Well it depends on the gun" (qtd. in Alldritt, Spy 98):

I criticize a machine by nearly the same criteria as I do a work of art. A Lee-Enfield rifle, a Hotchkiss machine gun, have nothing superfluous nor fussy about them. They are utterly simple - having reached that simplicity via complication and sophistication galore. The kind of people who, if they had literary minds at all, would like euphemism or trickiness, prefer Lewis guns or Remington or Ross rifles. My machine-gun is a Hotchkiss and I feel toward it something similar in kind to what I feel for Egyptian sculpture . I think Holbein or Bach or Praxiteles, as well as Alexander, would have appreciated a Hotchkiss gun" (qtd. in Alldritt, Spy 98).

      A clear parallel exists between divorcing the craftsmanship of a machine gun from its function and divorcing the aesthetic merits of art from its cultural and political relevance. In the Odes of the late '30s and '40s, Bunting tends to accentuate the distinction between aesthetics and politics through his valorization of the transcendent formal possibilities of verse. Ode "34", which carries the dedication "To Violet, with prewar poems,"²   exemplifies Bunting's anxiety over the historical contingencies of literature and his desire for formal longevity:

These tracings from a world that's dead
take for my dust-smothered pyramid.
Count the sharp study and long toil
as pavements laid for worms to soil.
You without knowing it might tread
the grass where my foundation's laid,
your, or another's house be built
where my weathered stones lie spilt,
and this unread memento be
the only lasting part of me (127).

      This same passion for permanence is visible in the last poem of the First Book of Odes, ode "37," "On the Fly-Leaf of Pound's Cantos" (1949), in which Bunting favorably compares Pound's modern epic to the Alps. One of Bunting's most compelling short poems, ode "37" only takes on its full significance in light of Pound's well known troubles in the 1940s. Having delivered pro-fascist radio addresses in Italy during the early 1940s, Pound had been indicted for treason in an American court in 1943, had been officially ruled insane in 1945, and had thereafter been incarcerated at St. Elizabeth's-a Washington, D.C., mental hospital. But Pound's ignominy was complicated by the fact that-after publishing his Pisan Cantos in 1948-he was awarded the first Bollingen Prize for literature, which was bestowed by the Fellows of the Library of Congress (a group that included W.H. Auden, T.S. Eliot, Allen Tate, Robert Lowell, and Robert Penn Warren, among others). Not surprisingly, the award generated a noisy backlash against Pound. ³   In an issue of the Saturday Review of Literature from June 1949, the poet and critic Robert Hillyer summarized the anti-Pound sentiments: "His poems are the vehicle of contempt for America, Fascism, anti-Semitism, and in the prize-winning 'Pisan Cantos' themselves, ruthless mockery of our Christian war dead" (9). Furthermore, Hillyer argued, "It may be stated flatly that the 'Pisan Cantos' are so disordered as to make the award seem like a hoax.. In general, they are merely the landslide from the kitchen-midden of a heart long dead: broken memories, jagged bits of spite, splinters of a distorting glass wherein the world is seen as it is not, a hodge-podge of private symbols, weary epigrams, anecdotes, resentments, chuckles, and the polyglot malapropisms that pass for erudition among the elite" (Hillyer 11). In the context of the Saturday Review of Literature in the summer of 1949, Hillyer's invocation of "broken memories," "jagged bits" "splinters" and "hodge-podge"-metaphors for collage technique in poetry-was not intended as a compliment.

      It is in this context, then, that one should read Bunting's "On the Fly-Leaf of Pound's Cantos":

There are the Alps. What is there to say about them?
They don't make sense. Fatal glaciers, crags cranks climb,
jumbled boulder and weed, pasture and boulder, scree,
et l'on entend, maybe, le refrain joyeux et leger.
Who knows what the ice will have scraped on the rock it is smoothing?

There they are, you will have to go a long way round
if you want to avoid them.
It takes some getting used to. There are the Alps,
fools! Sit down and wait for them to crumble! (130).

      The most challenging aspect of Bunting's aesthetic argument comes in the last two lines of the poem: "There are the Alps, / fools! Sit down and wait for them to crumble!" ⁴   (130). Like the "unread memento" of ode "34," the Cantos are a work for the ages. Critics like Hillyer may wait for this fragmented modern epic to go away, but-so suggests Bunting-such critics will be long gone before it does so. For Bunting, what gives Pound's work this solidity, this permanence, is its aesthetic achievement. Whatever political or moral complaints critics raise against Pound are unimportant within Bunting's extended mountain-metaphor because such complaints are the concerns of contemporary politics rather than timeless natural form. In aesthetic terms, then, the poems are as indestructible as mountains, and by defending them in spite of Pound's politics, Bunting was able to maintain his support for an old friend. As John Seed has pointed out, "in public Bunting remained loyal to Pound as the master craftsman of modern verse, maintaining a discrete silence about their profound political differences" (131).

      Bunting's turn toward formalism and aestheticism in the 1940s has important ramifications both for studies of his own work and for studies of modern poetry in general. Within the Bunting oeuvre, odes "34" and "37" represent an attempt to preserve and memorialize a particular brand of Poundian / Objectivist modernism. With Pound incarcerated and the first flowering of Objectivism at an end, Bunting equated the end of his First Book of Odes with the end of an era. In symbolically offering the critical reception of the modernist era to posterity, he discarded specific, local political concerns with Northumbrian farmers or with Pound's politics in favor of something he viewed as more monumental-aesthetic merit. The larger question for studies of modernist literature is whether or not this move from the political to the formal changes the interest and importance of the poetry. In light of the work of Cary Nelson and others, it has become increasingly apparent in recent years that so-called political poetry is far from being merely a disposable context for more central, "literary" works. In fact, to trace the history of Marxist political poetry in the 20th century involves the exploration of some of the most exciting avant-garde work in recent memory, including, of course, the experiments of Objectivism and the Language poets. In this context, Bunting's heightened concern in the late 1930s and 1940s for a kind of disinterested aesthetics may seem disappointing. But to blame Bunting for this formalist tendency-for this move toward the politics of no politics-is to discount the immense impact upon the women and men of his generation of two world wars within twenty years. If this was the price of politics, then what good was political poetry? However impossible transcendence of the political may seem in retrospect, it would have been a veritable necessity for a poet balancing a personal history of both political protest and patriotism, a friendship with a treasonous American fascist, an affiliation with a leftist / Marxist poetic movement, and a career as a British intelligence officer.