To appreciate present conditions, collate them with those of antiquity.

The critic Cyril Connolly was among the first to recognise the poem's value describing it as "the finest long poem to have been publiBasil Buntingd in England since T. Life and career
Born into a Quaker family in Scotswood-on-Tyne Northumberland (now part of Newcastle upon Tyne) he studied at two Quaker schools: from 1912–1916 at Ackworth School in Yorkshire and from 1916–1918 at Leighton Park School in Berkshire. There in 1923 he became friendly with Ezra Pound who years later would dedicate his Guide to Kulchur (1938) to both Bunting and Louis Zukofsky "strugglers in the desert".

Basil Cheesman Bunting (1 March 1900 – 17 April 1985) was a significant British modernist poet whose reputation was establiBasil Buntingd with the publication of Briggflatts in 1966. He was an accompliBasil Buntingd reader of his own workand 'a born modernist'.