A Shelf of Imaginary Books

 

    My home having limited space, I have found it convenient to house a portion of my library within my mind.  The shelves there of imaginary books never need dusting, and their contents are besides all mine, as opposed to the clunky palpable volumes I must share with their authors, and even, in a way, with previous readers.  This single parentage leaves the unreal titles with a certain simplicity, but it lends them as well a kind of lightness due to their airy conception.  Should these titles evanesce tomorrow, they are easily replaceable by a functioning fancy, in which case yours will do as well as mine. 

     Though secondary sources for many of these authors are elusive, the reader might always find a good account in the literary history of St. John Landers-Hoopes (who never objected to the public addressing him by his school nickname “Skoochy”).  His compendious if dated survey The Long Landscape of Literature treats every author here mentioned, and a select few are discussed in the more familiar and impressionistic essays of his Languors in the Library.

     On the shelf’s left side, claiming chronological precedence, is a collection of Old English poetry, including the “Song of the Swab” (“in scudding storms I swept the decks”) and the devotional “Mariner Christ” (“o steer, my son, by highest star”) as well as a fragment of The Battle of Buldkippen (“then came skirmish and slash, spar and set-to”).  Awash in sibilant alliteration, the browser will turn with relief to gossipy revelations of Beowulf’s character flaws in “Unferths Giedd.”

     The Middle English section includes the rollicking mystery plays treating The Likerish King Solomon and Noah Atþe Tauerne once performed as part of the observance of Corpus Christi by the people of Pucklechurch in South Gloucestershire.  Of interest to students of intellectual history is Gregory Grosseteste’s De philosophia mundi and his Tractatus Concerning the Revision of Ptolemy’s Geography based on Arabic sources and bound with his equally erroneous works on optics, algebra, and bee-keeping. 

     Next is a fat volume from the towering figure of the later medieval period Laurence Lemman including his Bouquet of Lovers’ Laments, recounting Biblical and Classical tales, replete with pathos and love-longing, and the dream allegory The Battle Between the Scorpions and the Nightingales which allegorically represents factions in the court of Richard II, the movements of the planets in the night sky, and a soap opera-like love triangle.  On a lighter theme Lemman also retold fabliaux such as the “Tale of Priscilla’s Handy-Man” and “Thieving Tom Scores Again.”      

     A charming if more obscure work possesses the space next to Lemman’s fat volume: the graceful tail-rhyme romance of “The Knight of the Dolorous Tooth.”  Likewise anonymous and inspired by similarly unmerited suffering, The Narrative of the Life of St Swithun details the bishop’s mortification by providential bunions while making his diocesan rounds.  Not included in the saint’s hagiography are two songs discovered in the faintest notation In the margin of his copy of St. Bernard’s Sermons on the Song of Songs: “Herkne to mine wonges wan” and “Bryng vs in an ocean of ale,” the latter sung yet today at the High Table of Oxford.

     The shelf’s Elizabethan section incudes Devereux Cholmondeley’s sonnet sequence Frumentum and Solitia, the delightful Latin lyric “Thōmâs, Thōmâs, filius tibicine,” and a selection of his drama containing the comic Never Too Much, a tragedy relating The Lamentable Reign of King Ooboo, and the unclassifiable Seasonable as Snow in Summer.  (Regrettably, none of these plays has ever been brought to the stage, and the only historical records of their author concern his numerous prosecutions for debt and disorderly conduct.)

     There follows a slim but complete book of the poems of the seventeenth century Cavalier Sir John Cribbage, known for such delicate and melodious lyrics as “Snipping the Tulips of Youth,” “A Meeting with the Milkmaid of Devon,” and “The Rose that is Most Ravishing.”  His more spiritual poems include “Sunk in a Cesspool of Sin” and one written in a more passionately mystical moment, “Licking the Wounds of my Lord” of which Buxtehude made a moving chorale.

     There follows a volume of essays by Denis Mowbray first published in the periodical Chit-Chat under the name Scriptor Stultus.  The author, descended from six generations of younger sons and finding himself on Grub Street, wrote such familiar favorites as “The Cavalier Who Could Not Ride,” “Boiled Beef and Grey Peas,” and “A Late Stroll on Pall Mall.”  These appear in an edition along with a selection of pieces by his colleague Timothy Toff using the name Jackanapes, including “Dozing on Chevy Chase,” “Advice Better Given Than Taken,” and “The Most Picturesque Beggar in Covent Garden.”

     With the arrival of neo-Classicism and the reign of heroic couplets came Jonas Dryasdust, writer of the literary satire Doctor Asinus and his Disciples, the philosophical musings of The Nature of Things, as well as such brief occasional pieces as “Mrs. Lovejoy’s Nosegay” and “On Tossing a Bone to Flora’s Fido.”  His essay “On the Poet’s Profession” stresses his concern with craft: “just as a fool may be shown to advantage, with sufficient polish even the dullest of sententiae can be brought to sparkle anew.”  

     Oliver Wickham, “the melodious finch of Staffordshire,” was an early suicide, but first composed a revealing allegory, The Palace of Indulgence, the topographical survey “The Potteries,” and short pieces such as “A Lofty View of Stoke-on-Trent” and “An Ode on Desuetude.”

    Toward the eighteenth century’s end came the chilling mysteries of Mrs. Cudworthy’s Lost in Italian Mists and The Jesuitical Pirate, as well as several anonymous novels from the Athena Press: The Convent Ruins and Cries from the Old Castle.

     The Collected Poetry of Miles Warnham marks a turn in poetic taste.  Warnham is remembered for such favorites as his “Expostulation to a Clod,” “A Distant View of Lincoln Minster,” and “On Peckishness.”  He boldly announced his dissent from the prevailing style with the influential preface “The Harp with Fancy Freed,” which advocated “uplifting the mundane with a steam-engine’s afflatus.”  Later, in less energetic terms, Warnham described the process as “tossing upon my subject a water-color wash of tastefully dilute genius.”

     For much of the nineteenth century, the influential poet laureate Lord Timothy Wiggins enjoyed a popularity (now long vanished) based on early lyrics that appeared in Posies, an Annual such as “Robin Hood’s Gambit” and “The Nasturtiums Speak.”  His metrical retelling of the life of Henry VIII, The Giant of England’s Destiny, which suppresses all but the first of the monarch’s marriages, has likewise aged poorly.  His poems celebrating the queen and her relatives and their many birthdays have yet to inspire even a dissertation.    

     Then, toward the end of the nineteenth century, one finds the works of the notorious Geoffrey Greville, better known by his nom de plume Sylvester Sybaris, including the scandalous novels Ganymede in Soho and Lost in Lethe as well as his little chapbook, a pamphlet really, Lavender Lyrics, the composition of which exhausted the author so that he was obliged to spend the year 1897 receiving visitors from a bed trimmed in peacock feathers.

     The collector of imaginary books has little taste for the present, so the last book, were it real, would have been published slightly over a hundred years ago: T. L. Cosgrove’s dark Modernist epic, The Cursed City (“the dark, dank nectar of the gutter/ has dripped upon my spats”).

     Perhaps one day one of the works from this shelf will be committed to paper, but not by me.  These days, it is all I can do of a summer afternoon to recline on my sofa, having selected a volume from the conceptual shelf for review.  My book will have the advantage of weightlessness, which facilitates reading supine and, when I do not fall into a doze, I find myself lifted into the aether by the author’s precious turns of phrase and profound insights.  I almost hear the snorts of Pegasus sounding rather hexametric.  Like dreams, however, these impressions are composed of gossamer and are all but instantly blown away by the breeze of time.  The remainder of one’s memories, knowledge, and taste, of course, last only a short while longer, but we each have a turn at playing the part of homo ludens and we can rejoice that among our toys are marvelous words and curious books, almost aglow, prickly with palpable meaning.

The Social Meaning of Witchcraft

 

     When I was teaching in West Africa, the Senior School Certificate Examination included questions about Shakespeare’s Macbeth, so the three upper forms read and reread that one play.  A compact thriller, it is probably a good choice for secondary students, but several in my class were particularly impressed with the witches.  “You see,” one of them told me, as though he had uncovered something he was not supposed to know, “the English have witches, too.” 

     The Nigerians, it seems, have so many that they are still outlawed, though legal conviction punishes far fewer than the number who suffer vigilante action.  Are the fictional Elizabethan weird sisters in fact substantially the same as their real Nigerian contemporaries who announced a professional conference of witches not so long ago in Benin City? [1]  How much does either have in common with the self-identified contemporary witches for whom the identity is associated with feminism and New Age beliefs or, on the other hand, with the traditional Christian view that a witch is a conscious agent of the devil?  In Margaret Murray’s many publications (pooh-poohed by other specialists), she argued that witches were simply devotees of a pagan religion.  Writers who were not anthropologists (and even some who were) used to refer to practically any tribal shaman, healer, or priest as a “witch doctor.”  Slippery as it already sounds, the definition is further complicated by the fact that there exist numerous accounts of male witches and of benevolent ones, and that the great majority of people who have been considered witches by others have denied the charge, at least until torture began.  Practically the only common factor is the alleged use of supernatural means, but a great variety of practitioners meet that criterion.

     The present inquiry therefore adds two further conditions.  The supposed witch is female and she uses her magic power with a malevolent aim.  Probably the most common usage in English and sanctioned by centuries, what this definition loses in inclusiveness, it gains in a sharper focus on the meaning of what is surely the most historically significant set of witches, those considered to be wicked women.  The great majority of people charged with witchcraft had, of course, no such malicious intentions, but the prejudice built into the term is itself informative.  Virtually all information about the phenomenon derives from the statements of the supposed witches’ voluble enemies, who considered these unfortunate women the worst of malefactors, leaving us with a substantial story of their persecutions but almost nothing about their actual beliefs or activities. 

    Hostile accounts of witches are prominent not only in European history, but in other parts if the world as well.   A few years ago the United Nations Human Rights Council passed a resolution calling for the “elimination of harmful practices related to accusations of witchcraft and ritual attacks.”  In many countries of Africa the existence of witches is widely accepted.  Only a few weeks ago the African Union voted to encourage its members states to remedy the damage done by such beliefs.  The resolution aimed at halting the outright murder or subjugation to ordeals of suspected witches, as well as a variety of harsh punishments such as their confinement to “witch-camps” in Ghana and enslavement in Tanzania [2].

     Several accused witches have been judicially executed in recent decades in Saudi Arabia where witchcraft remains a statutory crime [3].  In India accusations of witchcraft, primarily directed against poor, elderly, and low caste women, have occurred from early times until the present.  Over a thousand five hundred people so labeled are still killed every year [4].  In Papua New Guinea about a hundred women are killed annually for similar reasons [5].  Even in relatively developed countries such as Russia [6] and the United States [7] such incidents occur.

     The Biblical text most often invoked in European witch-hunting is Exodus 22:18: “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.”  Whether the term mekhashepha in this passage derives from a root meaning “mutterings” (referring to incantations) or from another meaning “cutting,” (indicating one who gathers plants) [8], it clearly indicates a practitioner of traditional remedies.  Of course, as the Hebrew scripture abundantly reminds us, anything savoring of another religion was anathema to the ancient Jewish leaders for ritual reasons apart from any ethical implications.  In this way all unorthodox beliefs became associated with disloyalty to Jehovah.  Later, of course, the Christian god proved no less jealous [9], and the practice of magic was identified with fealty to the devil.

    Due to the hegemony of European Christianity, witchcraft was universally forbidden from the start [10], but widespread persecution did not occur until the Early Modern era.  While the anxiety caused by wars and epidemics may have played a role, surely the principal reason for this escalation of violence in which tens of thousands were executed was the Reformation as the Roman Catholic Church moved to protect its exclusive franchise on the supernatural just as the ancient Jewish priesthood had done.  This is true in spite of the fact that few if any of the accused “witches” were in fact Satanists [11].  Whereas one might have expected that the belief in witches would have been more widespread during the Middle Ages in Europe when science was less developed, in fact it was not until the Reformation threatened and then overturned the long hegemony of Roman Catholicism that authorities seeking to reestablish control were moved to take action not only against the Protestant reformers but also against imagined enemies who were more easily overcome: old women, Jews, and those suspected of covert unorthodox beliefs.

     Beyond the attempt to maintain the hierarchical religious power structure the pursuit of witches also reinforced male authority in the family and in the community.  At base like all superstition and much of religion it expresses the anxiety people feel concerning events beyond human control.  Misfortune of all sorts, first of all mortality, but illness, injury, crop failure, and any of a myriad other calamities might strike at any moment.  Seeking protection from such undesirable but unforeseeable suffering, people fenced their actions with elaborate defensive systems. They honored the deceased ancestors, yet also took precautions to prevent them from bringing problems to the living. They relished the meat their hunters brought, yet performed rituals to propitiate the animals’ spirits. They courted, divided the tasks of life, and made heterosexual love, but remained anxious that the mysterious other might be surreptitiously causing harm.  The veneration of female fertility deities in prehistoric times represented at once the joy of nature’s plenty and the fear that its largesse might be withheld. Once such earth mothers were replaced in the role of divine chief executive and source of the good things of life by male sky gods such as Zeus and Jehovah, the rich gifts once associated with females both holy and human were lost and only trepidation remained in the face of the female supernatural.  It is the story of the rejection of Asherah among the Jews and of Pandora, once named “all-gifts,” but then said to have brought woe among the Greeks.

     The misogynistic implication of the belief in this sort of witches is undeniable. The wish of male culture makers to project responsibility for misfortune on the other led to the systematic repression and exploitation of women in patriarchies around the world. The case of witches makes clear that women’s relegation to second-class status was motivated by their oppressors’ self-interest (or, at any rate, by selfish intentions), yet men felt apprehensive still.  Customs such as the sequestering of women during menstruation certainly arose from the same sort of fear that led to the witch prosecutions. Often marginalized people – the poor, the eccentric, the foreigner -- were selected as particular scapegoats in the desperate effort to control the unpredictable turns of fortune or to seek revenge for misfortunes that had already occurred.

     Apart from those with religious power seeking to retain it, believers wishing to exhibit piety, and everyone’s wishing to avert bad luck, the concept of vicious female witches enforced male patriarchal control in a way accepted by most as self-evident and natural.  A more general, non-religious fear of women is suggested by the word witch’s otherwise paradoxical use to mean both an "old, ugly, and crabbed or malignant woman" (from the early 1400s) and a "young woman or girl of bewitching [i.e., attractive] aspect or manners" (middle 1700s) [12].

     Thus it has been the witch-hunters and not the witches who behave in a superstitious and an unchristian manner.  The strategy of scapegoating is of a piece with the prodigious human sacrifices of the Mayans and the Aztecs and the monstrous crime of the Holocaust as well as with the dehumanization of the poor and enemies in war, xenophobia, racism, and bigotry in general.  On a smaller scale similar patterns abound: the bullying of schoolchildren, domestic violence, blame-shifting and even supercilious language toward subordinates.  Life is insecure, suffering always at hand, and the resulting fear and anxiety stimulate the desire to believe that untoward events must be caused by others and that hostile action is required in self-defense.  Those with power easily believe that their power is justified.  Deflecting responsibility does not, of course, solve problems, and the result is often a redoubling of violence in the pursuit of well-being that would be poignant were it not so selfish.  The empathy and cooperation of people has always existed in tension with the demands of ego and the convenient ability to dehumanize those who live over the next hill and the more vulnerable among one’s own group. 

     While campaigns against witches have diminished, our species is as irrational as it ever was, and blaming and penalizing those who are weaker is as common as in the day of the Salem trials.  Magic thinking is so appealing to many that the mythic patterns survive.  When the war in Vietnam was draining the spirit of our nation and causing untold misery, a good deal of the public thought the problem was protesters.  When unions were organizing and Black scabs were brought in, white working-class people readily believed that their enemy was their fellow worker rather than the plutocrat exploiting them both.  When the government must save money, the savings are most often found in the small amounts spent on the poor, the ill, the outcast, the nonconformist.  In a curious echo of earlier delusions, many people thought during the 1980s and 1990s that Satanic ritual abuse and murder of children was occurring in spite of the lack of corroborating evidence [13].  Currently, many right-wing extremists fantasize that “liberals” and Democrats and the witch-like Hillary Clinton are regularly committing such crimes.  Today, when the existence of our species is imperiled by imminent environmental catastrophe, when millions of our brothers and sisters are in want, when the rich steal an ever greater proportion of our productivity, some are convinced that what needs remediation is people in drag reading stories to small children. 

     The black arts derive their evil character not from the acts of the so-called witches, but from the barbarous viciousness of those considered righteous.  Projection of one’s own faults, displacement of blame for adverse events, vilification of those who are in some way different, and, most dramatically, outbursts of murderous ferocity against outsiders have always been the most readily available solutions to human problems.  The only flaw in these approaches is that they do not work.

    

 

 

1.  in 1987, High Priest Osemwegie, playwright and founder of the Ebohon Cultural Center, announced a meeting of witches in Benin City.  After a storm of protest from fundamentalist Christians, he declared that the gathering would proceed, but, for security reasons, would be invisible.  More recently, in 2019 an academic meeting featuring academic papers in topics relating to witchcraft had been scheduled at Nsukka University, but had to reformulate its announcements due to Pentecostal pressure from churchmen who thought it was, as the earlier meeting had indeed been, a gathering of practitioners.

 2.  The UN resolution (#47) passed in July 2021.  Among many other sources, the camps are reported by Leo Igwe, “Witch Camps and Politics of Witchcraft Accusations In Ghana.” Maravi Post, June 13 2022 and enslavement in Dale Wallace, “Rethinking Religion, Magic and Witchcraft in South Africa: From Colonial Coherence to Postcolonial Conundrum,” Journal for the Study of Religion, Vol. 28, No. 1 (2015).

 3.  Among recent victims of this legalized murder have been Fawza Falih Muhammad Ali in 2006 and Amina Bint Abdulhalim Nassar in December 2011,

 4.  Seema Yasmin, “Witch Hunts Today: Abuse of Women, Superstition and Murder Collide in India,” Scientific American January 11, 2018.

 5.  An even higher estimate is suggested in the Wikipedia article titled “Witch-hunts in Papua New Guinea.”  The general situation In Papua New Guinea is surveyed in Charlie Campbell, “How a 7-Year-Old Girl Survived Papua New Guinea’s Crucible of Sorcery,” Time July 16, 2019.  Other stories may be found in   Maya Oppenheim, "Rising numbers of women in Papua New Guinea suffer brutal violence after being accused of 'witchcraft'," The Independent June 10, 2021.

 6.  Samantha Berkhead, “Practical Magic: How Russia’s Ancient Witchcraft Traditions Continue to Thrive,” Moscow Times, November 4, 2020.

 7.  Among the cases in the United States is that of E’Dina Hines in 2015.  Often, as in the case of Eder Guzman-Rodriguez in 2011, children are the victims. 

 8.  The translators of the Septuagint rendered the word as φαρμακοὺς, a word that (as Derrida in Plato’s Pharmacy noted) applies equally to a healer and a poisoner.

 9.  Witchcraft is a capital offense in the Laws of Hammurabi (eighteenth century B. C. E.).  Similarly, verse 102 of the second surah of the Koran (Al-Baqara) propounds the idea that devils teach magic.  “And they followed what the devils taught during the reign of Solomon. It was not Solomon who disbelieved, but it was the devils who disbelieved. They taught the people witchcraft and what was revealed in Babylon to the two angels Harut and Marut.”

10.  In England the laws of Alfred, for instance, condemn unrepentant witches to death.

11.  A sort of synthetic Satanism, primarily meant to be provocative, arose in the 18^th century with Philip Wharton, 1st Duke of Wharton’s Hellfire Club (1718) and Sir Francis Dashwood’s Order of the Knights (or Friars) of Saint Francis (1749) whose meetings Benjamin Franklin occasionally attended.  Later, playing with Satanism enjoyed something of a vogue with Éliphas Lévi and Aleister Crowley.  This trend reached a sort of epigone with Anton LaVey’s Church of Satan (1966).  The Satanic Temple, an entirely secular organization, was founded in 2012 by Lucien Greaves and Malcolm Jarry with the goal of provocatively challenging the intrusion of religion in American government.

12.  Oxford English Dictionary.

13.  A useful brief survey is provided in Bette L. Bottoms and Suzanne L. Davis, “The Creation of Satanic Ritual Abuse,” Journal of Social and Clinical Pychology vol. XVI, no. 2 (1997).

Basil Bunting’s Ambiguous Ars Poetica

 

     Poets are not dependable critics of their own work, but I take Basil Bunting at his word when he insists that the primary appeal of his poetry is sound, what his friend Pound called melopoeia.  To Bunting “a poem is a series of sounds in the air, just as music.” [1]  Commentary on his poetry might best be limited to a florilegium of choice excerpts with, perhaps, some analysis of their musical patterns, but I here adopt the more perilous route of explicating Bunting’s Ode 15, an ars poetica, more abstract in language and more dependent on meaning than much of his work.  Bunting often shrank from thematic implications altogether and, when he did theorize (as in his relation to Objectivism), he was likely to be a skeptic, criticizing propositions more often than embracing them, but this poem sets forth an unusually clear and rather extravagant notion of poetry’s potential.  Yet immediately after celebrating his art, he deflates his own ideas, then continues into a dancing dialectical series of turns.

    The poem is susceptible to paraphrase, a characteristic that comes and goes in Bunting.  Though the syntax slows to a sonorous and auspicious pace, at moments suspending meaning over rocky syllables, the first sentence makes grand claims for the aesthetic.  According to the ode, nothing directly observed in itself (“substance”) or preserved in memory (what “time/ stills or restrains”) can match for beauty (“design” and “supple measure”) the artistic product compounded of perception (“the tread/ sensuous things/ keep in our consciousness”) and reflection (“thought’s intricate polyphonic/ score”).  Art, then, trumps life.

     Should there be any doubt, Bunting specifically names his subject: “man’s craft,” but what makes the literary gesture the more bold and dramatic is his ready concession that poetry is always “the word spoken in shapeless night,” that is to say, spoken from the depths of human ignorance, without any comforting access to special truth.   What is inscrutable and unknowable becomes the very center of the revelation (as it is for the apophatic mystic).  The poet works not by accumulation but by removal, according to the formula dichten = condensare, with “paring away/ waste” in order to produce “the forms/ cut out of mystery!”  Mystery is not eliminated; the poem is made entirely of mystery, but hewn to a becoming shape.  The exclamation point, rare in Bunting, betrays his enthusiasm. 

   The poem thus produced surpasses other cognitive processes, but its excellence rests not so much in what it is as in the care with which it is constructed.  Its “taut” (well-crafted) sound ventures into a realm beyond what is perceptible (that is, into the “unseen”).  Only in this way is art capable of representing nature in the most profound mimesis: the clouds, the woods, the grain come into view.  The last term suggests the cyclic turn of life summarized in the seasons, indicating completeness but, at the same time, summoning thoughts of mortality.  Thus, as art is itself a part of nature, the artist and the work may age alike.  Since the author’s powers are limited by time, the appeal of a verse may also fade, as a blade of grass will dry, wither, and blow away unknown.  

     This prediction of the production and then the decay of art and insight is instantly enacted on the page.   After asserting what seemed for a moment the preeminent power of poetry, the poem reverses and ends with a concession of sorry defeat.  The “breeze,” which had resembled “a polyphonic score,” is at this point unfelt and unheard.  The final sound is the “thud of the ictus,” referring at once to the final syllables of Bunting’s rolling iambs and anapests and, in medical terminology, to a sudden attack or seizure, especially stroke, the body’s thud to the floor.  Bunting has eloquently cut the ground from under himself.  He lies at the end at our feet.

     The dialectic continues in an “Appendix” that followed in the Poetry Magazine publication providing a further image encapsulating the poem’s movement but emphasizing the inevitable collapse with Modernist irony.  The molten iron, not only glowing but superabundant, overflowing can turn to a cold lump, drained of drama, “turmoil,” and “peril.”  Emphasizing the loss of visionary excitement, the crashing return to the mundane in this coda heightens the bathos, with the final use of the devastating vulgarity “blob” a last indignity.  For the Collected Poems, Bunting decided to omit these last lines (though he doubtless regretted losing the archaic “spilth,” around which the passage revolved), leaving a more delicate but equally ambiguous conclusion.

     Thus he embraces poetry’s potential to embody the world and generate beauty while accepting its ultimate failure which parallels the inevitable weakening of its makers.  While a carefully constructed pattern of words may well represent subjective experience, this labor will in the end inevitably reveal nothing but “mystery.”  One is left not with truth, but with the consciousness of aesthetic grace: “supple,” “deft,” “sharp,” “taut,” everything seen “in its due array.”  The pleasure of the beauty implied by those adjectives remains undeniable if insubstantial, and the reader of Bunting’s verse, as melodious as that of Gerard Manley Hopkins (though Bunting lacked the Jesuit’s metaphysical foundation), will make do with the experience of the words’ music, very nearly literally one writer’s “whistling in the dark.”  While this commentary may be amusing, even useful for some, I do not doubt that, were Bunting to have read it, he would have declared “What the hell, it’s all rubbish.  Put it on a string and hang it up in the bathroom!” [2]  

  

 

1.  Jonathan Williams, “An Interview with Basil Bunting,” Conjunctions No. 5, 1983.

 

2.  Ibid.