Economist （review date 23 January 1993）

[In the following review, the critic praises Harrison as “one of today's most unusual writing talents.”]

For the first time in almost a decade, an English poet stands a good chance of winning the Whitbread prize, the literary award that ranks second only to the Booker in popular esteem in Britain. Unlike the Booker shortlist, which is confined to novelists, the Whitbread shortlist takes in writers of different categories of books—first novel, children's book, biography and so on.

The poet is Tony Harrison, and if he wins on January 26th it will represent deserved public acclaim for one of today's most unusual writing talents. Much of his poetry is written not for the printed page but for the theatre and television. And he is a writer who concentrates on public themes. One example is the dehumanising effects of war, in his television poem The Gaze of the Gorgon （his Whitbread collection）; another is man's capacity to misuse scientific discoveries, in a poem for the theatre, Square Rounds. Asked why he is so interested in public poetry, he replies:

When I was growing up in the 1950s, poets seemed too concerned to explore their own consciousness. The range of dramatic poetry has always been far greater than that of the short lyric, which was a kind of norm when I was just beginning. The best poetry I knew happened to be in plays—the Greeks and Shakespeare, for example.

Mr Harrison's enthusiasm for public themes also came out of a simple need to communicate. He was born in Leeds in Yorkshire, and his father, a baker, was a man of few words. In this non-bookish household, young Harrison grew up with a passion for words which was sometimes frustrated at Leeds Grammar School, where he was a classics scholar. His English master at the school refused to let him read his poetry out loud in the classroom because of his working-class accent. He would have to learn how to speak “properly”, he was told.

In later years, and as Mr Harrison acquired stature and confidence as a poet, he became determined to understand the reasons underlying this rebuff at school. He explored the tensions between the dialect and the accent of the northerners he grew up with and a literary establishment that sought to impose its own standards of gentility and correctness.

I hear many young actors delivering their lines in a Gielgudian fashion, and I say to them: ‘Where are you from?’ And when they say, ‘The north of England’, I say, ‘Let me hear the voice you had before you went to drama school.’ And in that voice there is a richer engagement, a more sensual engagement, with language.

Mr Harrison's efforts to bring new dignity to northern speech in the theatre have included northern versions of the medieval Mystery plays and of Aeschylus's Oresteia, in which the chorus sounded to one critic “like 15 Arthur Scargills”.

Mr Harrison's greatest model has always been Greek drama. He particularly likes the image of a theatre in the open air, with plays staged in the full light of day, where actors and audience are seen by the same light, provided not by a lighting system but by the sun. The Greeks in their tragedies, he says, looked unflinchingly at the worst they knew about life.

The subject matter of the Greek tragedies could not have been darker, “but unless you come to terms with dark subjects, there's no measure of life at all.” When people today see reality from Somalia, Bosnia or elsewhere on their television screens, he says, they watch only as much as they can bear to look at, and that is often not a lot.

Mr Harrison's The Gaze of the Gorgon includes “The Cold Coming”, a controversial long poem spoken in a deadpan tone by the charred skull of an Iraqi soldier who was killed in the retreat （the so-called “turkey shoot”） from Kuwait City at the end of the Gulf war. This is Mr Harrison at his most pugnacious, inveighing against the triumphalism of the victorious and attacking the idea that war can ever be a solution to mankind's problems because, he believes, war merely breeds war. But when asked whether poetry could be a force for good, Mr Harrison balked at the simpleminded idea behind such a question. Poetry was different from the kind of public involvement that manifests itself in demonstrations on the street. How was it different though?

It's something to do with its apparent uselessness. There is something about the act of writing poems which seems futile in the face of Phantom bombers. A poem engages on a different level. It reminds us of those other feelings we neglect in order to concentrate on destroying others like ourselves whom, for the purpose of the exercise, we call enemy—or less than human. Meaning, of course, less than us.