The Regional Impersonal as a Mode of Dwelling: Structures of Embodiment in David Jones’s The Anathémata and Basil Bunting’s Briggflatts
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The discussion of dwelling in this article focuses on T. S. Eliot’s controversial axiom of poetic impersonality as articulated in The Sacred Wood (1920) and practiced in The Waste Land (1922), and on how this axiom is rearticulated by his two younger contemporaries David Jones and Basil Bunting. I argue that in The Anathémata (1952) and Briggflatts (1966), their respective masterpieces, they reintegrate the ego absconditus through their distinct geo-aesthetical self-positioning which gives rise to “the regional impersonal” mode of poetic dwelling. This article explores the complex dialectics between the (neo)modernist claim of impersonality and the affective regional identification of the self-projecting consciousness in the two poems. While sharing Eliot’s regard for the poetic artifact, Jones and Bunting rehabilitate the notion of the poet’s cultural affiliation and representativeness as well as a culturally stimulated consciousness. Their act of self-sublimation is balanced by the material and sensual anchor of their regional allegiance. Further, the Eliotean fissure between the mind that experiences and suffers and the mind that creates resulting in a cascading multiplicity of voices in The Waste Land, is healed in Jones’s and Bunting’s poetic nostos and active mode of dwelling. Also, by giving resonance to numerous names and voices, mostly disembodied and obliterated entities, Jones’s and Bunting’s poetics introduces unifying strategies of impersonation reflecting their definite geo-cultural positioning. Eliot’s original aporia is thus not resolved but re-inhabited.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.044 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".