Click here to listen to So Here We Are on Miporadio. SoHereWeAre I want to say a few words about the second part of Basil Bunting’s poem Briggflatts (1966), which begins: Poet appointed dare not decline to walk among the bogus, nothing to authenticate the mission imposed, despised by toadies, confidence men, kept boys, shopped and jailed, cleaned out by whores, touching acquaintance for food and tobacco. Secret, solitary, a spy, he gauges lines of a Flemish horse hauling beer, the angle, obtuse, a slut’s blouse draws on her chest, counts beat against beat, bus conductor against engine against wheels against the pedal, Tottenham Court Road, decodes thunder, scans porridge bubbling, pipes clanking, feels Buddha’s basalt cheek but cannot name the ratio of its curves to the half-pint left breast of a girl who bared it in Kleinfeldt’s. He lies with one to another for another, sick, self-maimed, self-hating, obstinate, mating beauty with squalor to beget lines still-born. According to his biographer, Keith Alldritt (The Poet As A Spy 1998), Bunting, a Quaker and conscientious objector from Scotswood-on-Tyne, near Newcastle, may have found refuge in this part of London having been imprisoned in Wormwood Scrubs for 112 days, after refusing agricultural work on the grounds that it would send another man to kill in his place, and absconded from Winchester Civil Prison in June 1919. Subtitled ‘An Autobiography’, Briggflatts employs a variant sonata form to evoke the shape of a life from childhood to maturity. At the risk of simplification, it has five parts with stated themes moving from innocence with nature and culture in harmony through crisis to resolution. Part one sees youthful love abandoned in the Northumbrian fells in search of a poetic style equal to the mason’s craft and wider experience. Part two, mirroring Bunting’s own life, sees Fitzrovia, travels to Italy and exile elsewhere. The central part is a Dantesque nightmare concerning Alexander the Great falling off a mountain top at the edge of the world and how peace may be achieved through contemplation and resistance. There is then a move to the Dales and final return to Northumbria with a reflection upon past love and a celebration of skilled labour and other aspects of Northumbrian cultural life. The arc then is from innocence to experience with the Quakerism of part one seen afresh at the end. The poem is imbued with symbolism, Pound’s insistence on pruning the inconsequential and a neo-Wordsworthian pastoral. It is also distinguished by a rare sound patterning that is based on the earliest Welsh poetry. The symbolism is not fixed over time. The bull of part one becomes the poet appointed of part two. The riverbed pebbles, slowworm, the beat, and the singing voices of the young lovers recur, slightly changed, throughout the poem and take on new meanings. The symbolism is rather like musical riffs altered by the frame in which it is placed. This use of symbolism is not entirely removed from that of Mary Butts or John Cowper Powys, where function is changed without alerting the reader. And like T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), a key source was Jessie Weston’s From Ritual to Romance (1920), with its study of the Holy Grail stories and argument that the ultimate object of ritual was initiation into the secret of life, both physical and spiritual. What interests me in this passage is the gloss over significant experience that leads from a Quaker pacifism to the melting pot of Modernism in London and Paris to involvement in the Second World War and a return to home and the fact that we don’t know much about this man and his entry into and departure from Poundian Modernism. Fitzrovia, bordered by Soho to the south and Bloomsbury to the east, comprises Rathbone Place, Charlotte Street, Fitzroy Street and the surrounding area north of Oxford Street and west of Tottenham Court Road, has come to denote a Bohemian enclave where cultural difference was tolerated between the 1910’s