There is verse which is directly melodic, which seems to sing rather than speak. Basil Bunting is a master of this….

Bunting perhaps excels all living poets in expressing emotional complexity through apparently simple—not so very simple—melodic artifice.

But there is [another] sense in which poetry can be musical, in imitating not the sound but the structure of music…. Bunting's most famous song poem, Briggflatts, is … constructed this way in five sections. The first two, spring and summer, mount to a false climax; there is a high and narrow real climax in the non-seasonal third; in the fourth and fifth, autumn and winter, the climaxes gently decline. The conception was not merely abstractly musical, but had in mind the expressiveness of music….

What is clear is that, however much he feels that sound comes first, Bunting is incapable of writing a syntactically incorrect sentence or a meaningless one. He is not evading sense or even wit, his images are startlingly vivid, and he is ready to comment on them….

The poet who puts musical expressiveness rather than total sense structure first may leave us, in the end, with a sense of even the musical pattern unresolved. Where should it stop, where should it start? What is it that answers expectation and what, by deliberate dissonance, seeks surprise? If the pattern we start from is not clear enough we cannot trace the deviations from the pattern….

In an interview … Bunting expresses his admiration for Wordsworth, a fellow northerner, and one who had, at his best, a wonderful ear (as in the best of the Lucy poems, which have like Bunting's a power of implying more meaning than can be laid out flat). Yet saying something very important to him, at great length, is central to Wordsworth. Perhaps the admiration is that of the fox for the hedgehog. Perhaps Bunting knows "one big thing" but I do not know what it is.