Time & Perspective Quote by Basil Bunting

Bunting’s line is a poet’s warning shot across the bow of “explanations” that mistake reduction for insight. Calling the mystic’s high a “purchase” turns transcendence into a bad bargain: one ecstatic hit paid for with years of mental debt. The metaphor does double duty. It shrinks spiritual certainty into a kind of consumer transaction, and it frames confusion not as a private quirk but as a contagion, something that spreads through communities and, in Bunting’s view, corrodes shared standards of meaning.

The deeper target is a cultural habit: translating art into whichever prestige language is currently fashionable. His example - “poetry in terms of psychology” - isn’t anti-psychology so much as anti-substitution. When you explain a poem as symptom, you replace its crafted effects (rhythm, compression, ambiguity, sonic pleasure) with a diagnostic narrative that flatters the interpreter’s toolkit. That’s the “infectious” part: once the habit catches, everything becomes evidence for something else, and art’s autonomy gets quietly liquidated.

Context matters. Bunting came out of modernism’s insistence on precision and music in language, wary of the foggier strains of Romantic and occult uplift. He’s also writing in the long shadow of mid-century intellectual life, when Freud and his popularizers offered a new master key for human behavior. Bunting resists the master key. His subtext is almost ethical: confusion isn’t just an aesthetic flaw; it’s a social hazard when it teaches readers to trade attention for abstraction, experience for theory, poems for explanations.