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Basil Bunting, one of the greatest modernist poets, had an extraordinary life. Born in the mining village of Scotswood in Tyneside in 1900, after a largely Quaker education, during which at the age of 13 he met the love of his life, he left school in 1918 and went straight to prison as a conscientious objector. In Paris in the early 1920s after working as an artists model and road mender he was rescued from another spell in prison by Ezra Pound and Ford Madox Ford and became Fords assistant on the pioneering modernist magazine, the .

Excluded from France he found himself with Pound and W. B. Yeats in Rapallo on the Italian Riviera where he worked on sand boats and wrote the poems that formed the backbone of Pounds influential . Bunting spent the first part of the 1930s in the Canary Islands but fled to London with his young family at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. After his newly pregnant wife left him and took their two children to the US he lived on a boat on the south coast of England, trained as a seaman and captained yachts in America.