A POETICS OF DWELLING In Basil Bunting’s Briggflatts

The object of a quest Late twentieth century criticism of Romanticism has brought about a reappraisal of its main tenets and sought to break down its monolithic stature by a historicist interrogation of its ideology with respect to gender and Imperial politics. New canons have been proposed and from Romanticism we have moved to Romanticisms. Modern poetry also modifies Romanticism, treating it less as an epoch than as a mode within which to work, adapting it to suit modern perceptions and methods. After all, the English Romantic poets lived and wrote through the whole experience of hope and disillusionment: theirs was the master epic narrative of the aspiration to social liberation and ensuing dismay, easily adaptable to the twentieth century. Perhaps we should say, therefore, not that Romanticism recurs, as if as a reaction from within or without Modernist or postmodern poetry against the neo-Classical leanings of those movements (logocentricity, arbitrary formal rules, urbanity…), but that it endures as a