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Tony Harrison
Tony Harrison

Genres | Bibliography | Prizes and awards | Critical perspective
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Photo: © Jane Bown

Biography
Tony Harrison is Britain's leading film and theatre poet. He has written for the National Theatre in London, the New York Metropolitan Opera and for the BBC and Channel 4 television. He was born in Leeds, England in 1937 and was educated at Leeds Grammar School and Leeds University, where he read Classics and took a diploma in Linguistics.

He became the first Northern Arts Literary Fellow (1967-8), a post that he held again in 1976-7, and he was resident dramatist at the National Theatre (1977-8). His work there included adaptations of Molière's The Misanthrope and Racine's Phaedra Britannica.

His first collection of poems, The Loiners (1970), was awarded the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize in 1972, and his acclaimed version of Aeschylus's The Oresteia (1981) won him the first European Poetry Translation Prize in 1983. The The Gaze of the Gorgon (1992) won the Whitbread Poetry Award.

His adaptation of the English Medieval Mystery Plays cycle was first performed at the National Theatre in 1985. Many of his plays have been staged away from conventional auditoria: The Trackers of Oxyrhyncus was premièred at the ancient stadium at Delphi in 1988; Poetry or Bust was first performed at Salts Mill, Saltaire in Yorkshire in 1993; The Kaisers of Carnuntum premiered at the ancient Roman amphitheatre at Carnuntum in Austria; and The Labours of Herakles was performed on the site of the new theatre at Delphi in Greece in 1995. His translation of Victor Hugo's The Prince's Play was performed at the National Theatre in 1996.

His films using verse narrative include V, about vandalism, broadcast by Channel 4 television in 1987 and winner of a Royal Television Society Award; Black Daisies for the Bride, winner of the Prix Italia in 1994; and The Blasphemers' Banquet, screened by the BBC in 1989, an attack on censorship inspired by the Salman Rushdie affair. He co-directed A Maybe Day in Kazakhstan for Channel 4 in 1994 and directed, wrote and narrated The Shadow of Hiroshima and Other Film/Poems, screened by Channel 4 in 1995 on the 50th anniversary of the dropping of the first atom bomb. The published text won the Heinemann Award in 1996. He wrote and directed his first feature film Prometheus in 1998.

In 1995 he was commissioned by The Guardian newspaper to visit Bosnia and write poems about the war. His most recent collection of poetry is Under the Clock (2005).

Tony Harrison lives in Newcastle upon Tyne.

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Genres (in alphabetical order)
Drama, Poetry, Screenplay

Bibliography
Earthworks University of Leeds, 1964

Aikin Mata: The Lysistrata of Aristophanes (translator) Oxford University Press, 1966

Newcastle is Peru Eagle Press, 1969

The Loiners London Magazine Editions, 1970

The Misanthrope (translator) Rex Collings, 1973

Palladas: Poems (translator and introduction) Anvil Press Poetry, 1975

Phaedra Britannica Rex Collings, 1975

Bow Down Rex Collings, 1977

The Passion Rex Collings, 1977

From the School of Eloquence and Other Poems Rex Collings, 1978

Looking Up (with Philip Sharpe) Migrant Press, 1979

A Kumquat for John Keats Bloodaxe, 1981

Continuous (50 Sonnets from the School of Eloquence and Other Poems) Rex Collings, 1981

The Oresteia (adaptation) Collings, 1981

US Martial Bloodaxe, 1981

Selected Poems Penguin, 1984

Dramatic Verse 1973-1985 Bloodaxe, 1985

The Fire Gap: A Poem with Two Tails Bloodaxe, 1985

The Mysteries Faber and Faber, 1985

V Bloodaxe, 1985

Theatre Works 1973-1985 Penguin, 1986

Anno Forty Two: Seven New Poems Scargill Press, 1987

Ten Sonnets from the School of Eloquence Anvil Press Poetry, 1987

The Mother of Muses (limited edition) Rampant Lions Press, 1989

Losing Touch (limited edition) Rampant Lions Press, 1990

The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus Faber and Faber, 1990

A Cold Coming: Gulf War Poems Bloodaxe, 1991

Square Rounds Faber and Faber, 1992

The Common Chorus (an adaptation of Aristophanes' Lysistrata) Faber and Faber, 1992

The Gaze of the Gorgon Bloodaxe, 1992

Black Daisies for the Bride Faber and Faber, 1993

Poetry or Bust Salts Estates, 1993

A Maybe Day in Kazakhastan Channel 4 Poetry, 1994

Penguin Modern Poets 5 ((Tony Harrison, Simon Armitage, Sean O'Brien)) Penguin, 1995

Permanently Bard Bloodaxe, 1995

Selected Poems Penguin, 1995

The Shadow of Hiroshima and Other Film/Poems Faber and Faber, 1995

Plays (Contents: Poetry or Bust; The Kaisers of Carnuntum; The Labourers of Herakles) Faber and Faber, 1996

The Prince's Play/Victor Hugo (translator) Faber and Faber, 1996

Prometheus Faber and Faber, 1998

Plays 1: The Mysteries Faber and Faber, 1999

Laureate's Block and Other Occasional Poems Penguin, 2000

Plays 4: The Orestia/The Common Chorus (parts 1 and 2) (translator) Faber and Faber, 2002

Under the Clock Penguin, 2005

Buy books by Tony Harrison at Amazon.co.uk

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Prizes and awards
1972 Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize The Loiners

1983 European Poetry Translation Prize The Oresteia

1987 Royal Television Society Award (film) V

1992 Whitbread Poetry Award The Gaze of the Gorgon

1994 Prix Italia (Italy) (film) Black Daisies for the Bride

1996 Heinemann Award The Shadow of Hiroshima and Other Film/Poems

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Critical Perspective

Harrison has forged a singular career as a poet, dramatist, film-maker - and these all in verse. He was a working class scholarship boy and his obsession with class and his passion for classical literature remain the two driving forces of his work. His early poems, collected in The Loiners (1970) (Loiners are residents of Leeds), were muscular and anguished about sex, class, family and the struggle to acquire culture. The characteristic poem was perhaps 'Thomas Campey and the Copernican System', the poem that opens the book. Thomas Campey was a poor second-hand bookseller who sold books off a handcart. Harrison is a buyer of second-hand books and the ironic distance between the culture Campey purveys and his own pathetic circumstances is at the heart of Harrison's art. He insists on both high art and the consequences for the class he came from of the stratification of society that high art entails.

Harrison travelled very widely in his early years as a poet, especially in Africa and Eastern Europe. The African poems convey a teeming panorama of self-disgust and degradation 'I murmur over and over; / buttocks...buttocks...BUTOX, / marketable essence of beef - / negritude - dilute to taste!' from 'The Zeg-Zeg Postcards'.

In his early years Harrison didn't publish conventional self-contained volumes, but worked on series of poems, From the School of Eloquence and Other Poems (1978) and Art & Extinction which were added to over a long period. This hindered an appreciation of his work and his poetry only reached a wide audience with the publication of the Penguin Selected Poems in1984.

From the School of Eloquence and Other Poems contains his best-known poems, sonnets about his parents and extended family, class, and poetry. The title is a good one because all these poems are about 'utterances' of various kinds. He reflects on the inarticulacy of his family, his Uncle Joe who stammered and could 'handset type much faster than he spoke', his English teacher telling him 'Poetry's the speech of kings. You're one of those / Shakespeare gives the comic bits to: prose!' There is an obsessive zeal about these tightly interlocked poems. Themes echo in many poems: fire and destruction, with special reference to the VJ celebrations in 1946 (which he remembers as a boy of 9) and Hiroshima, the extinction of species, the power that articulacy brings, the painful self-limitation of the working class ('too posh for me! He said (though he dressed well) / If you weren't wi' me ah'd nivver dare!').

Harrison spent some time in America in the late 1970s and early 1980s and the poems that emerged were longer, more relaxed and discursive. He said 'I don't read America with the same spikey class instincts as I read England'. Poems like 'Cypress and Cedar', 'The Red Lights of Plenty', 'The Lords of Life', are wide-ranging meditations on nature, homesteading, the American way.

In poetic terms Harrison returned to England with a vengeance with the publication of his most famous poem, v. (1985). A long poem in rhyming quatrains deliberately echoing Gray's Elegy in a Country Churchyard, v.. captures a moment in English life when the collapse of traditional industries like mining undermined a whole way of life. Harrison puts the resultant nihilism into the mouth of a lager-swilling yobbo and admits, for all his berating of the youth, that there's something of the vandal in him too: he remembers as a teenager letting off a fire extinguisher at a singer and orchestra. The justification he gives for this is revealing:

What I hated in those high soprano ranges
Was uplift beyond all reason and control
And in a world where you say nothing changes
It seemed a sort of pricktease of the soul.

Harrison's next full collection The Gaze of the Gorgon (1992), although a normal miscellany volume, did have some unity. Harrison's poems about the Gulf War, 'Initial Illumination' and 'A Cold Coming', began a new phase for him, appearing in the Guardian newspaper rather than a literary magazine (v. had first appeared in the London Review of Books). Harrison believes that poetry should address the great issues of the day and that it should strive for a mass audience.

This tendency became even more pronounced during the Bosnian conflict of 1992-4. The Guardian sent Harrison to the region as poetic war correspondent. Thanks to poems like these and his television films Harrison had a very high profile during the 1990s. Inevitably his name was mentioned as a contender for Poet Laureate when Ted Hughes died. But Harrison is a fierce republican and he published another poem in the Guardian, 'A Celebratory Ode on the Abdication of King Charles III', which effectively ruled himself out. This and other new poems were published as Laureate's Block by Penguin in 2000. Some critics have felt that in such recent poems the ferocity of his polemic has been detrimental to his verse, which can seem clumsy when compared to the early sonnets.

© Peter Forbes

For an in-depth critical review see Tony Harrison by Joe Kelleher (Northcote House, 1996: Writers and their Work Series).

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Author statement
'Poetry is all I write, whether for books, or readings, or for the National Theatre, or for the opera house and concert hall, or even for TV. All these activities are part of the same quest for a public poetry, through in that word 'public' I would never want to exclude inwardness. I think how Milton's sonnets range from the directly outward to the tenderly inward, and how the public address of the one makes a clearing for the shared privacy of the other. In the same way I sometimes think that my dramatic poetry has made a clearing for my other poems. I sometimes work with ancient originals written at times when poetry had the range and ambition to net everything, but if I go to them for courage to take on the breadth and complexity of the world, my upbringing among so-called 'inarticulate' people has given me a passion for language that communicates directly and immediately. I prefer the idea of men speaking to men to a man speaking to God, or ever worse to Oxford's annointed. And books are only a part of what I see as poetry. It seems to me no accident that some of the best poetry in the world is in some of its drama from the Greek onwards. In it I find a reaffirmation of the power of the word, eroded by other media and by some of the speechless events of our worst century. Sometimes, despite the fact that the range of poetry has been diminished by the apparently effortless way that the mass media seem to depict reality, I believe that, maybe, poetry, the word at its most eloquent, is one medium which could concentrate our attention on our worst experiences without leaving us with the feeling, as other media can, that life in this century has had its affirmative spirit burnt out.'

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