Collier, John - Basil Bunting (review date August 1932)

Basil Bunting (review date August 1932)

SOURCE: Bunting, Basil. “Valentine and Orson.” Poetry 40, no. 5 (August 1932): 293-95.

[In the following review, Bunting regards Gemini as a “sizeable achievement” despite its affectations.]

Edith Sitwell says: “A writer to whom the gentle and insipid word ‘talent’ cannot be applied, but a greater word of whose use we are, as a rule, afraid.” In case you inquire for Miss Sitwell's credentials, here they are: “The only modern poet who is completely successful in verse seems to me to be Miss Edith Sitwell”: by John Collier, preface to Gemini. These poems have also been awarded two valuable prizes, so they come well recommended. Finally, they are, it seems, a sort of hail and farewell to verse; the poet stepping into the arena for half a mo', then right out again before the critical wild beasts have time to tear him.

After all these prefatory safeguards, this...

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