Basil Bunting was born in 1900 in Scotswood-on-Tyne which was then a colliery town on the outskirts of Newcastle. Northumberland, the most northerly part of England, would always be important to Bunting's sense of self. In effect, the poet came from a geographical location with a distinct regional and cultural identity which set him apart from those writers who more readily identified with the capital's metropolitan culture. Quartermain acknowledges the influence of the Newcastle Literary and Philosophical Society on the poet's early education. Bunting read Cuthbert Sharp's The Rising of the North which documented the Catholic uprising of 1569. Queen Elizabeth's response was swift and brutal. Following the orders of the Earl of Sussex, Sir George Bowes ‘marched […] through Tynedale and Redesdale killing plundering and destroying, saying ‘'the best fruit a tree can beare is a dead traytour'’ ‘. As a young man in his twenties, now sometimes living in London, Bunting encountered the modishness of metropolitan Bloomsbury with a marked lack of enthusiasm. His attachment to Northumberland might also be contrasted with Philip Larkin's provincial niggardliness.

Larkin's attitude is demonstrated in ‘I Remember, I Remember', a poem whose withering metaphysic leans ironically on Thomas Hood's nineteenth-century evocation of halcyon child- hood. Larkin's poem is about Coventry, the place of his birth, a city later destroyed by the Luftwaffe. The poem takes the form of a train conversation in which the poet-speaker remains resolutely disenchanted. The train comes to a stop and the speaker looks out and exclaims: ‘Why Coventry! […] I was born here'. This provides an opportunity for a catalogue of non events and the fellow passenger asks whether he ‘wished the place in Hell'. The speaker claims, in that existentially unnerving final line, that ‘Nothing, like anything, happens anywhere'. Larkin had a talent for fuelling the anodyne with a special turbo charge. The train was in all likelihood on the way to Hull where Larkin lived most of his adult life. Here he affected a calculated retreat into provincial suburbia where he cultivated the poetic ideology that had many of its premises in his 1955 ‘Statement'. The inaccessibility of Hull suited Larkin too.