[In the following excerpt, Wood argues that several contemporary British translations of Greek classics, including Harrison's Oresteia, “are claims, made through language, that Britain has history again, and that its troubles and divisions can be compared to those of other countries and ages.”]

“What's Hecuba to them?” we might ask, thinking of contemporary British poets translating the Greeks; of Irish and Yorkshire idioms attaching themselves to classical names and places. But the question doesn't have to be dismissive or sure of its answer. Tony Harrison's Oresteia （1981）, Tom Paulin's version of Antigone, called The Riot Act （1985）, are not simply old plays in modern linguistic dress; they are claims, made through language, that Britain has history again, that its troubles and divisions can be compared to those of other countries and ages.

Haven't we always had history? Of course. But the great conspiracy, running roughly from the end of the Napoleonic Wars until very recently, was that our history was a grand pageant, a decorous success story, something we boasted to Americans about and wheeled out for ceremonies. There was lots of it, but all in the past. It was not the turbulent stuff that other nations continued gracelessly to have. We had no modern revolution, no unhappy proletariat （who were the Chartists again?）, consequently no class struggle. No slavery, hence no racial problems. We did have an Empire, but not for profit or power or anything like that, and in any case we gave it away. No one quite believes this stuff now, although I suspect that many people don't know, so to speak, that they don't believe it—don't know how much their current fear and discontent have to do with the secret death of this ludicrous belief. The striking thing is how long the belief held out, and the imprint it leaves.

It is an engaging paradox that the Classics, so long the untended domain of an English elite, should become one of the instruments of a new consciousness. The Greeks and Romans speak to us （and speak our language） because we have ceased to treat them as strangers. They speak not of harmony and measure and chalky classrooms, but of violence and loyalty, of angrily competing allegiances. Tom Paulin thinks of life under the questionable government of Northern Ireland as life “under Creon”: under a Diktat, that is, an arbitrary human invention, heedless of the demands of the gods （Paulin in some moods is sure he knows what the gods want; in most moods sure he knows what they don't want）. More subtly and riskily, particularly in view of the fancy rhyme at the end of this stanza, Harrison enrolls both Yeats and Virgil for a Yorkshire grief. The scene is a working class sitting room used only for Christmases and death:

The best clock's only wound for layings out
so the stillness isn't tapped at by its ticks.
The settee's shapeless underneath its shroud.
My mind moves upon silence and Aeneid
VI.

（from “Study”）

Harrison's Oresteia depends on a strongly stressed alliterative line, owing something to Middle English, more to Hopkins. The line gets muscle-bound at times, seeming to parody its own burly forcefulness—“Base battle-bronze battered gets blackened and mottled,” “Grudge gangrenes the gut”—but also achieves more delicate effects. The Eumenides say, “We memorise murders”; Menelaus sees “Helen-shaped shadows”; life is “as bright as a ballad.” A lot of the energy in the writing comes from the cheerful eclecticism of the voice, which borrows from Graves （“Goodbye to all that”）, Marlowe （“topless towers”）, and dozens of others. In the following lines, for example, geezers and bairnhood belong to quite different regions of English, and the old men seem to have hobbled in from Baudelaire:

Argos geezers, back to bairnhood,
ghosts still walking after cockcrow,
old men, dreams abroad in daylight.

How far is Argos? This would be another way of asking Hamlet's question about Hecuba, and the interest of Harrison's Oresteia in relation to his Selected Poems is that it is a practical response to the problem Harrison repeatedly asks the Classics to figure for him. “don't speak Greek,” an angry skinhead says in V （1985, and included in the new English edition of the Selected Poems; it does not appear in the American Random House collection） when the poet drops into fussy or literary French （cri de coeur; Rimbaud's Je est un autre）. It is all Greek—the tired phrase becomes a grim and lively joke—to this rabid contemporary, the unemployed lounger Harrison feels he might have been, and would like to talk to and for. Argos is education, reading, knowledge, as close as a good poem, and as far as that poem is likely to be from all but a tiny cultural circle. Many of Harrison's ambivalences hover here; much of the life of his writing; many of his false notes too. The epigraph to Selected Poems is “… son io il poeta / essa la poesia.” Is that a boast or a bit of humble pie, and what would the skinhead make of it? Are poet and poetry being contrasted, or offered as a connection? Like father and son, perhaps. But is that a connection? “I'd like to be the poet my father reads,” Harrison says in a poem called “The Rhubarbarians,” and the title is its own comment on the wish. Yet the wish is moving: Harrison would like to write more accessibly, and would also like his father to have had the schooling he lacked. Several very good poems center on the intimacies of misunderstanding which beset educated children and uneducated parents. “A good read” presents the poet as youngster devouring Ibsen, Marx, and Gide, and getting one of his father's “you-stuck-up-bugger-looks,” with the comment “ah sometimes think you read too many books.” The poet sneers （silently） that his father reads only whiskey labels and football programs, but later acknowledges both the good sense and the deprivation behind his father's hurt suspicion:

I've come round to your position on ‘the Arts’
but put it down in poems, that's the bind.

That's the bind. Poems are articulation for Harrison, a political act, a voicing of what is otherwise unvoiced, a defense of the silent, because “the tongueless man gets his land took.”

How you became a poet's a mystery!
Wherever did you get your talent from?
I say: I had two uncles, Joe and Harry—
one was a stammerer, the other dumb.

（from “Heredity”）

But articulation is also betrayal, a crossing over into the privileged world of speech. “Three cheers for mute ingloriousness,” Harrison mockingly cries in “On Not Being Milton,” and all the pain of the situation hangs in the phrase. We can cheer for the mute and the forgotten, but they can't cheer for themselves, and do they want our cheers? The poet writes, but who reads him? What if the mute don't want or don't acknowledge the voice he kindly lends them?

The problem doesn't always arise. All poetry which is not purely confessional is a lending of voice. A song is a small drama, a performance of a plight. In Selected Poems Harrison sings breezily in the person of randy colonials stuck in Africa; sees a waltzing mother-in-law as “Viennese with happiness”; imagines the feelings of the bride of Philip II of Spain during the Inquisition; hums a ballad of death in Beverly Hills:

don't adjust the skew-whiff Manet
You'll touch off the thief device
monitored each nook and cranny
of this closed circuit paradise. …
cold carioca or chill cha-cha
charnelwise to Forest Lawn.

（from section 3, “The Bonebard Ballads”）

Harrison's cleverness is so offhand and prodigal that we cannot possibly wish he had taken in fewer books. He plays the pedant, noting that pay is “patience's first morpheme”; tilts Nerval toward wistful pornography:

Je suis le ténébreux …
le veuf …
always the soixante and never the neuf.

（from section 5, “The White Queen”）

In one sense Harrison almost is the popular poet his father might have read: difficult only in his range of references; easy and traditional in rhyme and meter.

“Randiness, my life's disease,” one of Harrison's colonials says; and Harrison himself has a healthy sense of the body's demands and entanglements. “Love's not something you can hoard / against the geriatric ward.”

                                                  You complain
that the machinery of sudden death,
Fascism, the hot bad breath
of Powers down small countries’ necks
shouldn't interfere with sex.
They are sex, love, we must
include
all these in love's beatitude.

（from “Durham”）

The body is an answer to bookishness; and a better answer is that body and books belong to the same uncertain but color-filled world.

A remarkable early poem, “Thomas Campey and the Copernican System,” gathers a great deal of this criss-crossing material. A Leeds waste collector with a bad back, “squeezed lungs and damaged heart” drags his heavy handcart round the city, bearing among other things the refuse of much reading: copies of Gibbon, Spengler, Mommsen, a medical textbook, Marie Corelli, Ouida, Patience Strong. The man is a martyr and a treasure, a connoisseur of “familiar last straws,” who dreams of death as a final straightening of his bent back beneath a graveyard slab:

                                                  just one
More sharp turn of the earth, those knees will crack
And he will turn his warped spine on the sun.
Leeds! Offer thanks to that Imperial Host,
Squat on its thrones of Ormus and Ind,
For bringing Thomas from his world of dust
To dust, and leisure of the simplest kind.

The high rhetoric is both mocking and tender, miming the grand send-off Campey ought to have but won't.

But even here the body and the books are ours, or could be, and Harrison's problem returns as soon as we try to take the mute and the unlettered into our talkative company. The question is central to V, which doesn't quite work, I think, but fails for instructive reasons. The poem is an answer and an echo to Gray, from whom those mute inglorious Miltons come, an elegy written in a city churchyard, complete with Gray's stanza and meter—although without Gray's solemnity. Indeed the verse has a wonderfully motley, dishevelled air, and even the rhyme seems insolent rather than tidy.

If buried ashes saw then I'd survey
the places I learned Latin, and learned Greek,
and left, the ground where Leeds United play
and disappoint their fans week after week,
which makes them lose their sense of self-esteem
and taking a short cut home through these graves here
they reassert the glory of their team
by spraying words on tombstones, pissed on beer.

Harrison's parents are buried in this graveyard, which hangs above a disused mine—that is why the tombstones lean and look so higgledy-piggledy—and the poet fears that empty darkness beneath the darkness more than he fears death:

A matter of time and it will swallow
this place of rest and all the resters down.

He has devised an epitaph for himself which includes （in rhyme） the obscenity which will sooner or later deface his stone. For the stones in this place are all sprayed with curses and verbal violence, anathema on blacks and victorious visiting football teams. The V of the title is the versus of sport, but also all the againsts of class antagonisms, confessed at last in England, and unmistakable during the miners' strike of 1984. United is the name of the local team, and the word has been sprayed by a skinhead on Harrison's parents' gravestone. Harrison brilliantly, desperately tries to rescue the word from hate, to make it signify the joining of his parents in death—

an accident of meaning to redeem
an act intended as mere desecration

—but quickly sees a more disturbing double sense in the scrawled letters. He and the skinhead are united, their problems are not separate, they inhabit a single world. This is a decent thought, and far better than disowning the disaffected altogether. But Harrison and the skinhead are no more united than Leeds or Harrison's dead parents, and none of Harrison's energetic articulating of the skinhead's position as against his own—

don't talk to me of fucking representing
the class yer were born into any more
Yer going to get 'urt and start resenting
it's not poetry we need in this class war

—can really mask this. Harrison is careful to let us see that the speech he lends the skinhead is lent, that he is talking to a figment of his own imagination. But there is still an implied claim of articulation and understanding （son io il poeta）, and I think here Harrison says too much. It is possible to rob people of speech by talking for them, by taking up the semantic space they might occupy with all the things we don't know, can't know. Still, the dilemma is real enough. We can hardly leave the mute to speak for themselves. V would be a triumph if it could accommodate all this; as it is, it creates an awkward sense that Harrison believes he is somehow still in touch with the very world he gets such pathos out of having lost. …