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Tony Harrison is a British poet and translator who writes powerfully and movingly about class, art and politics. Although his verse forms are often traditional, his subject-matter is frequently explosive and revolutionary, as he investigates the nature of social injustice and civil unrest. He is very much on the side of the poor, particularly the poor in the North of England. He was born and raised in Leeds, and many of his best poems centre on the 'Loiners' that populate the city. Harrison is the first to recognise the possible contradiction inherent in his writing. He writes about people that rarely read poetry, in a language that has little in common with their dialect. He deals with this by incorporating elements of Northern slang and by writing direct, accessible, lucid verse. He believes in the importance of performance poetry and in the vital link between oral and written English. This is perhaps why he is a successful dramatist as well as a poet. His translations of Molière and Greek classical drama have won a variety of awards. Harrison's poems are always dramatic, full of energy, disputatious, contradictory, jagged and wilful. Two of his chief influences are D.H. Lawrence and Ted Hughes. However, this is also Harrison's principal shortcoming. Like Lawrence and Hughes, his doggedness and assertiveness can become parodic. It is very easy to send up Harrison's poems, with their full rhymes, belligerence, sentimentality, autobiographical nostalgia and fierce crudity. Of course, this does not mean that Harrison's poems are not impressive, only that he is sometimes a consciously limited writer, with a clearly recognisable tone and register. Whether this has led to him being read by working-class readers is unclear. However what is more certain is the fact that he is one of Britain's most widely-admired writers, who treats the vocation of literature with a passionate seriousness. He is perhaps the only living British poet to seriously rival those other great contemporary English-language poets: Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott and Les Murray. He is hugely admired by younger British writers, particularly Simon Armitage and Glyn Maxwell. The Los Angeles Times has called him 'the most gifted poet in England today'. The Independent has written: 'Harrison is one of the best poets in the country -- some would say the best.'

Tony Harrison was born on the 30 April 1937 in the Beeston area of Leeds, the first child of Harry Harrison, a baker, and Florence Horner-Harrison. At the age of eleven, he won a scholarship from the local primary school at Cross Flatts to Leeds Grammar School. He has made no secret of his hatred of the proud, sixteenth-century academic institution where he was made to feel an outsider, one teacher calling him a 'barbarian'. He was forced to tame the Yorkshire accent that he later described (in 'Wordlists II') as 'the tongue that once I used to know/ but can't bone up on now' and the circumstances of being a 'Scholarship Boy' were to provide a central theme for his poetry. From school he went on to Leeds University where he completed a degree in Classics. Greek poets would be a definite presence in his English verse: he loved their combination of bawdiness, beauty and craft and came to despise the way in which the Romans emasculated and distorted this legacy. Harrison went on to take a diploma in linguistics and research verse translations of Virgil's Aeneid for a Ph.D thesis which he failed to complete. Some of Harrison's early poems appeared in the university magazine, Poetry and Audience, which he edited for a time.

After a period spent working as a teacher in Dewsbury, Yorkshire, Harrison married Rosemarie Crossfield Dietzsch, an artist, in 1960. In 1962, with his wife and baby daughter, he left England for Nigeria, fulfilling an ambition which had been formed years before when the local greengrocer gave him an unwanted copy of David Livingstone's Travels. While lecturing at the new Ahmadu Bello University at Zaria in Northern Nigeria, Harrison published his first collection of poetry, Earthworks (1964), and produced his first theatrical piece. Aikin Mata (1966), an African version of Aristophanes's Lysistrata, was written in collaboration with the Irish poet, James Simmons, for a group of student actors at the university. In Harrison's view, as expressed in the preface to the 1966 edition, the rich combination of music and dance allowed by the performance highlighted parallels between classical and African dramatic traditions: 'Masquerades like the Yoruba Engungun of Oshogbo with their dual sacred and profane functions as ancestor spirits and as comic entertainment seem closer to Greek comedy than anything one has in modern Europe.' The play was performed to capacity audiences and attracted tremendous acclaim.

From Nigeria, Harrison took his family to Prague where he spent a year teaching at Charles University. Here he found 'an embattled culture in which the normal aspirations of a writer's work are blocked by censorship', but was inspired by the way that people living under an oppressive regime had learned to 'read ancient texts with a sense of them being news'. In 1967 he returned to Britain where he became the first Northern Arts Fellow in Poetry. Harrison took up residence in Newcastle upon Tyne where he has lived on and off ever since. 'I deliberately went on living in the North East', he has said, 'because here you're much more aware of what's against poetry. It helps to stop me being pretentious.' He co-edited Stand magazine and produced some striking visual narrative poetry including 'Newcastle is Peru', a long autobiographical poem in octosyllabic rhyming couplets. A UNESCO Fellowship took him to Cuba, Brazil, Senegal and Gambia in 1969.

Harrison's first full-length book of poems, The Loiners, was published in 1970 and brought him the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. The collection is in five sections, the first containing poems about 'Loiners' -- citizens of Leeds -- and recalling Harrison's own childhood and adolescence there. The second section deals with expatriate Loiners in Africa, the third with Eastern Europe, and the fourth and fifth with the poet's return to England. It is thus an extended exploration of material introduced in Newcastle Is Peru (which is reprinted in the fourth section). 'Loiners' also suggests loins, and Harrison's poems are full of frank sexual imagery and colourful obscenity. His mother famously complained (in unintentional blank verse): 'You weren't brought up to write such mucky books!' An anonymous critic in the Times Literary Supplement defined The Loiners as 'a single five-part poem', and found it 'trenchant, pugnacious, hard-bitten'. Its sexual preoccupations give it 'at the very least, an above-average novelistic interest. Mr Harrison has the rare knack of manipulating his ironically regular iambics to sustain a story-line or sketch a quick character.'

'Allotments' is one of the poems in the first part of The Loiners. It focuses on Harrison's misspent youth. He remembers all of the places where young lovers were forced to meet. Like all of Harrison's best poems, it is both crude and brilliantly constructed, both raucous and fiercely intelligent.

In Leeds it was never Who or When but Where.
The bridges of the slimy River Aire,
Where Jabez Tunnicliffe, for love of God,
Founded the Band of Hope in eighteen odd,
The cold canal that ran to Liverpool,
Made hot trickles in the knickers cool
As soon as flow. The graveyards of Leeds 2
Were hardly love-nests but they had to do--
Through clammy mackintosh and winter vest
And rumpled jumper for a touch of breast.

Harrison perfectly conveys the seediness of these encounters, but he also makes them comic and affectionate.

'The Songs of the PWD Man' is a representative poem from the second section of 'The Loiners'. These pieces are all set in Africa and draw on Harrison's experience as a lecturer in Nigeria. 'The Songs of the PWD Man' is a blatant attempt at modernising Kipling, to make his rollicking, barrack-room ballad metre an authentic vehicle for the colonial experience. Harrison speaks in the persona of an ageing white colonial administrator, displaying all of his talent for dramatic speech and convincing impersonation.

I'll bet you're bloody jealous, you codgers in UK,
Waiting for your hearses while I'm having it away
With girls like black Bathshebas who sell their milky curds
At kerbside markets out of done-up-fancy gourds,
Black as tar-macadam, skin shining when it's wet
From washing or from kissing like polished Whitby jet.
They're lovely, these young lasses. Those colonial DO's
Knew what they were up to when they upped and chose
These slender, tall Fulanis like Rowntrees coffee creams
To keep in wifeless villas. [. . .]

Harrison refuses to ennoble the colonial caste, nor to make the experience of Empire prettier than it actually is. He takes Kipling's 'Tommy' and he makes him more savage than any African. Paradoxically, he also makes him more human and articulate.

Harrison's anachronistic ability to deploy the rhyming couplet to both serious and ironic effect was a factor in John Dexter's decision to commission from him an adaptation of Molière's verse play Le Misanthrope. This was the National Theatre's contribution to the tercentenary of the dramatist's death. It was the first in a series of adaptations commissioned and directed by Dexter, and its great success enabled Harrison thereafter to earn his living as a translator of verse drama. The project was not without teething troubles. Harrison had set his adaptation in 1666, the year of the play's first performance, and had worked on it for a year when Dexter decided that he wanted a modern-dress production. Unable then to leave his text 'marooned in the seventeenth century', Harrison moved it forward three hundred years to the France of General de Gaulle, shortly before the events of 1968. As he says in his introduction, he employs 'a couplet similar to the one I used in The Loiners, running the lines over, breaking up sentences, sometimes using the odd half-rhyme to subdue the chime, playing off the generally colloquial tone and syntax against the formal structure'.

Alan Young, in his essay on Harrison's poetry in Critical Quarterly, wrote that

as in Molière's French original, Harrison's verse for the [central] character of Alceste performs a complex dramatic function. It is simultaneously an expressive vehicle for a vulnerable, frustrated sensibility and a method of distancing or critically placing that sensibility. Because of the way he rings all the changes of rhyme Harrison's couplets delight us continually with their conscious artifice. He is skilful too in using the verse simply at times to convey, for instance, the astonishment and anguish of idealism betrayed.

Peter Buckley went so far as to call The Misanthrope 'with all due reverence to Molière [. . .], the best new play of the '70s', and in France also the piece was welcomed as 'a brilliant adaptation'.

Between 1973 and 1974 Harrison was Gregynog Arts Fellow at the University of Wales. While here he wrote his next play, Phaedra Britannica (1975), a version of Racine's Phèdre, again for the National Theatre at the Old Vic. In his introduction to the play, Harrison wrote that he had used 'old material to make a new play' (as Racine himself had done), setting out 'to rediscover a social structure which makes the tensions and polarities of the play significant again'. The Greek myth of Phaedra concerned the forbidden love of a woman for her stepson. By shifting the scene to British India under the Raj, where all the social and sexual tensions between the native population and the British rulers could be brought into play, Harrison made the play relevant to a twentieth-century audience.

John Weightman felt that the transposition of the play to Victorian India, had the effect of destroying 'the naturalness of the continuity between the human and the divine' but found the stage production 'fascinating from beginning to end'. Oswyn Murray, writing in the Times Literary Supplement, pointed out that Harrison's use here of rhyming iambic couplets 'offset the passionate and uncontrollable emotions that are expressed through it, just as the controlled coolness of Racine's language heightened the violence of the original'. Murray also thought, unlike Weightman, that 'the new setting [. . .] allows us to believe in the influence of the gods of India on the action, from the betrayal of the Memsahib's mother by lust to the final curse of the Governor, which brings forth Siva's monster to stampede his son's polo ponies and drag him to his death'.

After Phaedra Britannica Harrison held the Northern Arts Literary Fellowship for a second time (1976-1977) and also worked as resident dramatist at the National Theatre. Here he created The Passion and, with the composer Harrison Birtwistle, Bow Down, both staged at the National's Cottesloe Theatre in 1977. The Passion, which later became part of the full mystery cycle The Mysteries, was described in the Guardian as 'one of the best things to come out the National to date'. There was little critical objection to Harrison's employment of Yorkshire dialects and use of the conventions and techniques of music hall and pantomime in his version of these demotic medieval plays.

For critics who tend to favour Harrison's verse, the publication of the sixteen-line sonnet sequence, From 'The School of Eloquence' and Other Poems (1978) and its extended sequel, Continuous (1981) was a turning point in his poetic career. Continuous has a three-part structure: the first comprising densely-wrought political and historical poems; the second intimate personal poems focusing on the death of Harrison's parents; and the third a looser set of poems about art and morality. In the examination of issues such as estrangement caused by a bourgeois education, and the deep roots of class inequality and cultural deprivation, the sequence draws together the political and the historical with the emotional and the biographical. According to Luke Spencer (in The Poetry of Tony Harrison), 'Above all, the unifying theme is that of "eloquence" itself; more specifically, of how a command of language can liberate, and its absence imprison.'

'On Not Being Milton', the first poem in the sequence, propounds the view that 'Articulation is the tongue-tied fighting'. In 'Them and [uz]', Harrison remembers how he was confined to playing the drunken Porter in Macbeth, and told that only Received Pronunciation was suitable for reading Keats aloud or performing the poetic parts of Shakespeare. As the teacher says, 'Poetry's the speech of kings. You're one of those/ Shakespeare gave the comic bits to: prose!' Harrison's response is to turn the tables on his teacher-tormenter, launching an invasion of the literary territory he claims to posess -- 'So right, yer buggers, then! We'll occupy/ your lousy leasehold Poetry'-- and ridiculing him for failing to see the the implications of Wordsworth's own flat vowels:

You can tell the Receivers where to go
(and not aspirate it) once you know
Wordsworth's matter/water are full rhymes,
[uz] can be loving as well as funny.

The second section of Continuous opens with the double-sonnet 'Book Ends'. In this moving poem, Harrison records his mother's observation about how father and son would sit on either side of the fireplace without having a word to say to each other: 'You're like book ends, the pair of you, she'd say,/ Hog that grate, say nothing, sit, sleep, stare...'. Another powerful poem in the volume, 'Long Distance', describes how Harrison's father coped with the loss of his wife:

Though my mother was already two years dead
Dad kept her slippers warming by the gas,
put hot water bottles her side of the bed
and still went to renew her transport pass.
[. . .]
I believe life ends with death, and that is all.
You haven't both gone shopping; just the same,
in my new black leather phone book there's your name
and the disconnected number I still call.

In the view of Ken Worpole, writing in New Left Review, 'one of the most evident strengths' of these poems 'derives from the tension created between the classical literary form of the sonnet and the colloquial nature of the subject matter. It is precisely that tension which gives the poems their sharp sense of irony and self-conscious dignity.' Worpole was more critical of Harrison for a susceptibility to self-dramatisation: 'the whole sequence is about his own class and cultural predicaments'; furthermore, 'there are no references to any other children or friends of his own age, no evocation of children's games, street life or any of those "collective memories" which are usually the very stuff of the literature of class or geographical exile.'

Alan Ross, on the other hand, decided that 'no English poet has ever used dialect and the rhythms of working-class speech to such powerful effect as Harrison in these poems'. For Blake Morrison, this,

is a verse which coughs and splutters, all fits and starts. The clumping rhymes, the all-too-iambic pentameters, the awkward and repetitive abbreviated 's's' [. . .], the sheer confusion of lay-out and typography, as capitals, italics, Latin and Greek tags, brand-names, songs, advertising jingles, dictionary symbols and dialect rub shoulders on pages that have no pagination -- these must be some of the least fluent poems in the language. But they mean to be. The poetry that comes as naturally as leaves to a tree is, they imply, the poetry of the leisured classes, whereas these are poems that must work for their effects.