re-visit Aestheticism and Loyalty: Basil Bunting's Response to World War II

I criticize a machine by nearly the same criteria as I do a work of art. A Lee-Enfield rifle, a Hotchkiss machine gun, have nothing superfluous nor fussy about them. They are utterly simple - having reached that simplicity via complication and sophistication galore. The kind of people who, if they had literary minds at all, would like euphemism or trickiness, prefer Lewis guns or Remington or Ross rifles. My machine-gun is a Hotchkiss and I feel toward it something similar in kind to what I feel for Egyptian sculpture . I think Holbein or Bach or Praxiteles, as well as Alexander, would have appreciated a Hotchkiss gun...