Briggflatts

When I was a youth I used to read T S Elliot’s Four Quartets and this. This was lost to me and then I saw it had been re-issued with notes, a CD of the poet reading it and a DVD of the documentary from which this You Tube was culled.

Poetry should be read Bunting says. But not by an actor. Poetry like music is to be heard.

‘Poetry is seeking to make not meaning, but beauty; or if you insist on misusing words, its ‘meaning’ if of another kind, and lies in the relation to one another of lines and patterns of sound, perhaps harmonious, perhaps contrasting and clashing, which the hearer feels rather than understands, lines of sound drawn in the air which stir deep emotions which have not even a name in prose. This needs no explaining to an audience which gets its poetry by ear. It has neither time nor inclination to seek a prose meaning in poetry.’