[In the following essay, Forbes argues that Harrison has more in common with eighteenth-century poetic models than his twentieth-century contemporaries.]

There has been surprisingly little discussion of Tony Harrison's poetics, as opposed to his subject-matter. The crossing of his classical education with his background has mesmerized many into thinking that's all there is to it. Douglas Dunn, a poet with whom Harrison has occasionally been linked to form a notional school （tagged ‘Barbarians’ after Dunn's book of the name, or ‘Rhubarbarians’, after Harrison's poem）, has briefly considered Harrison's poetry on several occasions.

＼H］is style is reminiscent of the sub-classical manner of Thomas Gray. Historically alert readers might also sense the pre-Augustan clarity of Dryden, or the varied urbanities of Virgil, Horace, Juvenal, Ovid and Martial.¹

The pedal he presses consistently results in verse that could be called sub-classical, encrusted with Northern vernacular, sometimes demotic, but never populist ＼…］²

It is significant, and I believe correct, that Dunn doesn't seek to place Harrison within a twentieth-century tradition. For Harrison is curiously at odds with his contemporaries. He rejects the burnished sonorities of Heaney, the eye-cramming images of Raine, the trickeries of Muldoon. For all their differences, most of his coevals partake of the contemporary Zeitgeist, enshrined in the Poetry Workshop nostrums: ‘Show, don't tell’; ‘Particular, not general’. These ‘rules’ derive from Pound's precepts and represent his lasting influence. Although Harrison wrote a poem （‘Summoned by Bells’）³ to mark Pound's anniversary, and used Eliot's ‘Journey of the Magi’ to supply both epigraph and title for one of his Gulf War poems,⁴ there's no evidence in his work for even the minimal Poundian influence that most contemporary poems display. （‘Summoned by Bells’ suggests that Pound ‘helped to re-botch’ the civilization he described in ‘Hugh Selwyn Mauberley’ as ‘botched’.⁵）

Not only is it difficult to place Harrison among his contemporaries, he doesn't often discuss them. He has expressed an impatience with what he sees as poetry's reduced horizons:

Poetry used to inhabit all the important arenas, the theatre, politics, that was where poetry operated. Then it retreated and shut itself away in the poetry magazines. What defeatism! What a pathetic decline!⁶

The poetry chose its little-magazine parish rather than the wider arena is questionable, but the inverse correlation between public verse / clarity and coterie poetry / difficulty is well established. Because small groups can communicate successfully in codes that would be meaningless to a wider audience, increasingly esoteric poetry actually becomes favourably selected in such groups, thus diminishing the audience even further.

But when Harrison began writing he did not seem such a singular figure. At the end of the sixties a new generation of formal poets emerged—Douglas Dunn, Derek Mahon, John Fuller, Fleur Adcock, Kit Wright. These poets were more adventurous than the Movement generation, and Harrison seemed to belong among them. They shared a new brio, frankness in sex, regionalism—for all their different personalities, here might have been a new movement with Harrison one of its prime exponents. But the others sit quite happily in the twentieth-century canon—Auden is the figure behind them, in varying degrees certainly, but if any of them wrote a sonnet, it would be in awareness of ‘Who's Who’ （‘A shilling life will give you all the facts’.）⁷ A Harrison sonnet will be Miltonic, Wordsworthian, or Meredithian.

Tony Harrison has always had friends and supporters among the poets: whilst a student at Leeds he met Geoffrey Hill, Wole Soyinka, James Simmons, and Jon Silkin, who published his early work in Stand. Alan Ross published his first book-length collection Loiners at London Magazine Editions. His fellow Yorkshireman Blake Morrison has been a staunch supporter. But the terms on which Harrison works—everything bar a few brief introductory essays in verse, no reviewing⁸—and his negative feelings about the poetry scene have inevitably led to a distancing.

The exception in terms of twentieth-century influence was the American poet Robert Lowell. The pungency of Lowell's early work provided an encouragement to Harrison. ‘The Nuptial Torches’ is the best example: a literary poem, unrelated to Harrison's experience, which imaginatively animates its epigraph: ‘“These human victims, chained and burning at the stake, were the blazing torches which lighted the monarch to his nuptial couch.” （J. L. Motley, The Rise of the Dutch Republic）’.⁹ One could compare this with Lowell's ‘A Quaker Graveyard off Nantucket’, which doesn't have an epigraph but recreates the death of the sailors （in a sense the gravestone is the epigraph）. Compare these lines from Lowell and Harrison:

Light
Flashed from his matted head and marbled feet.
He grappled at the net
With the coiled, hurdling muscles of his thighs;(10)
Young Carlos de Sessa stripped was good
For a girl to look at and he spat like wood
Green from the orchard for the cooking pots.
Flames ravelled up his flesh into dry knots(11)

Lowell's Grand Guignol rhetoric is observable throughout Loiners, but it is absent from Harrison's mature style, the dynamics of which I shall develop later.

In his early years the poet Harrison was most often linked with was Douglas Dunn. Critics and readers seem to like pairing poets off: Heaney and Hughes, Sexton and Plath, Auden and MacNeice, Armitage and Maxwell. Resemblances in these cases are more likely to be superficial than profound. Tony Harrison and Douglas Dunn share working-class backgrounds and an insistence on formal metrics, but I believe they are very different. Dunn is a social and civic poet who has adapted the inheritance of Auden and Larkin to his own ends. His Barbarians （1979） may well owe something to Harrison, but a poem like ‘The Student’ shows their essential difference.

Dunn's subject is an ‘unknown student’ figure from Renfrewshire in 1820:

For our mechanics’ Literary Club
I study Tacitus. It takes all night
At this rough country table which I scrub
Before I sit at it(12)

Harrison's student is himself, sitting at a foldaway card table: ‘Ah bloody can't ah've gorra Latin prose’.¹³

I should like to enquire more deeply into the ‘sub-classical manner of Thomas Gray’ identified by Dunn.¹⁴ I believe that Harrison's circumstances and aims made twentieth-century Modernism and its followers an unsuitable academy from which to learn, whereas a long-ignored eighteenth-century aesthetic suited him very well.

In 1985 Nicholas Bagnall wrote an innocuous sounding and little-noticed book under the misleading title A Defence of Clichés.¹⁵ Bagnall's purpose was to question the overriding twentieth-century aesthetic imperative: Pound's ‘Make it new’. Against this, Bagnall opposed the eighteenth-century notion that writing should be ‘what oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed’,¹⁶ that writers should use phrases that the reader has met before, rather than slow them down by making them try to unpick wholly novel phrases and allusions. He emphasizes the universal pleasure people take in shared catchphrases and of course links the eighteenth-century practices to the enormous credibility the classics then had. To quote from the classics was a virtue in itself, so much so that the eighteenth-century goal could be said to be the exact opposite of the Poundian novelty principle: a well-used phrase was hallowed by such usage, not diminished by it.

The connection between all this and Tony Harrison is his classical education. I believe that Harrison has carried the traits of a classical education into his verse practice far more rigorously than other classically trained poets, Louis MacNeice, for example. MacNeice remained a practitioner of the classics, but, despite a few versions of Horace, his poetry is of the twentieth century, influenced by Auden, Eliot, and further back by Hopkins. Harrison's attitude to his masters is classical—he keeps them constantly in view. Milton and Wordsworth are classical touchstones for Harrison in a manner foreign to MacNeice. The names ‘Milton’ and ‘Wordsworth’ occur several times in Harrison's poetry, along with many others more incidental. You won't find the names of poets very often in MacNeice's poetry—Hopkins, a key influence, never appears at all.

If the names Milton and Wordsworth have an iconic force in Harrison's poetry unusual in the twentieth century so also do the words poetry and poet. Harrison reifies the concept of the poet to an unusual degree. For him it is the equivalent of the more solid and earthy trades he grew up among in Leeds. He is unlikely to share Miroslav Holub's view of the tenuous status of the poet （Yes, you wrote a poem once, but how do you know You'll ever write one again?）. He has said: ‘I wanted to make poetry a real job, and that's a question of hazarding the whole of your life on what you do’.¹⁷

A classical training of course is also a training in eighteenth-century thought processes. The classics have not changed and the Englishing of them reflects the period when they really mattered to us. What Harrison uniquely did was to graft on to classical notions of verse discipline his own vision of poetry as the equal of an industrial trade. Poetry to Harrison had to be at least as well made, not as prose, but as a leak-free plumber's joint. The man who parsed the Latin hexameters mutated into ‘the man who came to read the metre’. Harrison has also sought to justify formal verse by pointing out that iambic pentameters occur regularly in ordinary speech—especially the speech of his parents: ‘If you weren't wi'me now ah'd nivver dare’.¹⁸

But your father was a simple working
man,
they'll say, and didn't speak in those
full rhymes.
His words when they came would scarcely scan.
Mi dad's did scan, like yours do, many times!(19)

Some find the combination of a fierce working-class sensibility and classical learning in Harrison paradoxical, but in fact they reinforce each other perfectly. It is the upper middle classes who lost their faith in Latin tags and went whoring after novelty. Homeric epithet finds a ready echo in working-class life: Lofty-browed Homer becomes Dead-eye Dick.

The great Yorkshire fast bowler Freddie Trueman was once quoted by a journalist on the origins of his nickname. Trueman said that they called him ‘Fiery’ because ‘it rhymes with Fred’. He was demonstrating his naive enthusiasm for poetry, alliteration being an inherently demotic art even if the word itself is unknown to the less well-educated. Sportsmen and women are always ‘Gorgeous Gussie’, ‘Fiery Fred’, or ‘Typhoon Tyson’ because finding likenesses in which the sound matches the sense is as instinctive a human activity as breathing.

What's more, the kind of everyday glum, undeceived, put-you-in-your-place rhetoric of working-class life isn't a million miles from Gray's Augustan language （making the appropriate transpositions, e.g. ‘fly-blown dump’ for ‘ivy-mantled tow'r’²⁰）. A working-class neo-Augustanism seemed ready-made for Harrison, reinforced by both his background and his classical training. And in this language, the two poles which are consciously set apart in his poetry find a reconciliation. His insistence on his background and his classics dictated his verse style, and made him a neo-Augustan, perhaps without knowing it.

The theorist of the Augustan age was Edmund Burke in his A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful （1756）. The essence of Burke's ideas was that we all see and feel the same things, so that what the reader experiences in reading poetry is recognition: of the states and moods described, which are universal, and the language in which they are described, which is conventional but is learnt by every educated person. Romanticism destroyed this notion; it sought unprecedented states, absolute individuality. Nothing that has happened since compares with the force of this change, not even Modernism, which can be seen as an extension of Romanticism in its insistence on the unprecedented, the extreme, even if it contradicts its metaphysics.

On one level, the difference between eighteenth-century and Modernist poetry can be summed up as: eighteenth-century poetry intends to communicate by using the common stock of ideas and phrases and moulding them into something harmonious—new but not startlingly novel; Modernism began in a revolt against bourgeois common values and deliberately eschewed the common stock of received ideas and phrases. We have become so used to Modernism （at least in its diluted form as practised by most contemporary poets） and its influence that of all the centuries the eighteenth now seems the most remote. Poets from Chaucer to Donne, and from Wordsworth onwards, are still alive for us, are chosen for Poetry Please, and still influence to some extent poetry today. But the practice of a poet like Pope seems to differ in a fundamental way from much of what preceded and followed it.

But if the eighteenth century is so unpopular today, how is it that Tony Harrison has come to write some of the most widely read contemporary poetry using its techniques? This paradox is explained by Harrison's subject-matter and diction. The formal principles of eighteenth-century verse are aimed at relatively easy understanding and a wide readership. The problem is that the subject-matter and sentiments expressed today seem impossibly pallid and low-key. But Harrison's poetry is blazingly passionate and aggressively up to date in its diction.

The eighteenth-century aesthetic has been important to Tony Harrison because of his passionately expressed desire to communicate to the widest possible audience. The Modernist's badge of pride in his alienation from the common herd is not for him: too aware of the alienation caused by his education, he wants to bridge gaps not widen them. Harrison's belief that poetry should appear in newspapers, on stage, and wherever the culture is vibrant has inevitable stylistic consequences. Despite seventy-five years in which acclimatization could have taken place, the wider public, even, say, the serious novel-reading or theatre-going public, have never really accepted difficulty in poetry. To be difficult has been to guarantee a small audience. Tony Harrison's early poetry, although not Modernist in technique, was knotty with allusion, and the syntax was often contorted. There has been a progressive ironing out, and his recent work has been much plainer than the earlier. It is no accident that when V. was subjected to attack by philistines, moral guardians, and the tabloid press, figures from the general arts culture such as Bernard Levin and Joan Bakewell rushed to its defence. These were people who had not often spoken up for contemporary poetry before. What made the difference was that here was a cause célèbre—and it was a poem you could understand! Not since Betjeman had there been a poet who so clearly wrote to be read widely, and to be read aloud. Closer in spirit to Harrison of course （if opposed in politics） is Kipling, a public poet, a political poet, and one who wrote in strong, archaic rhythms. Above all, Kipling is the poet recently voted the most popular amongst a wide audience （BBC1 viewers）. In many ways Tony Harrison is the Kipling de nos jours.²¹

Several strands can thus be identified in the forging of Harrison's style: his classical training, which fosters respect for quotation and pre-digested phrase or modulation therefrom; the need to find a voice acceptable to a wider public; the conception of verse writing as a trade like any other, with its hallowed rituals and stereotyped procedures; his work in the theatre, with its requirement for clarity and strong rhythms; his unwillingness to accept the compromises made by his poetic contemporaries—writing reviews, judging competitions, running workshops, which has cut him off from the contemporary poetic Zeitgeist. All of these factors work in the same direction. They reinforce the tendency towards a taut, rhythmic style in which the diction doesn't depart too far from common usage, and isn't afraid to use conventional emotional expressions which receive an echo, if not in every bosom, in readers of the Guardian at least.

I am aware that Tony Harrison might not recognize himself in this picture. He acknowledges a debt to the seventeenth century rather than the eighteenth—particularly Donne, Marvell, and Milton. But Harrison's sensibility is not really metaphysical. Even when he writes in Marvellian mode in Kumquat, he doesn't attempt a ‘green thought in a green shade’:²² his verse is closer to the flatter diction of Pope and Gray. It might not be too fanciful to trace a movement from seventeenth to eighteenth century in his verse, from the pungent and elliptical early poems—‘The White Queen’, Newcastle—to the more meditative and smoothly paced ‘Following Pine’, ‘Cypress & Cedar’, and, of course,V.

V. obviously suggests Gray's Elegy as a starting-point, and the parallels have been extensively discussed by Sandie Byrne.²³ But there are very obvious stylistic disparities between the poems. Gray's Elegy is a compendium of received wisdom expressed in received phrases: ‘ivy-mantled tow'r’, ‘rugged elms’, ‘lowly bed’, ‘blazing hearth’, ‘yew-tree's shade’, ‘cool sequestered vale’, ‘purest ray serene’.²⁴ The leisurely pace of the poem and its strict metrics no doubt encouraged these sonorous phrases. No wonder Dr Johnson found that it ‘abounds with images which find a mirror in every mind, and with sentiments to which every bosom returns an echo’.²⁵ To some extent the echo was built in. To be fair to the poem, some of it is far more original than this. Its quotable quotes: ‘Far from the madding crowd's ignoble strife’, ‘Some mute inglorious Milton’,²⁶ deserve their status. But in V., as in all of Harrison's poetry, there are hardly any epithets at all, let alone cosy ones. His poetry is relentlessly substantive. He famously said that what was between him and his father were ‘books, books, books’,²⁷ and what his poetry is made of is ‘nouns, nouns, nouns’. The vice of weak poets, to be always searching for flowery adjectives in an attempt to make a description more precise, never occurs to him.

When Harrison does use compound epithets, they are, like Gray's, from the common stock—‘hard-earned treasures’,²⁸ ‘tart lemon's tang’, ‘dew-cooled surfaces’,²⁹ or simply physically descriptive—‘buried ashes’, ‘shored slack, crushed shale, smashed prop’, ‘unclaimed stone’, ‘blunt four-letter curses’.³⁰ Unlike Gray's, though, these epithets have no designs of ‘poetry’ on us; they are deflationary rather than uplifting. ‘Gilded prayer’³¹ is the only one remotely akin to Gray. They are the dystopian inverse of Gray's mildly rubefacient phrases.

Harrison's attitude to the canon of English poetry is enshrined in his verse. ‘So right, yer buggers, then! We'll occupy | your lousy leasehold Poetry’.³² Appropriation rather than homage: he takes just what he needs and no more. Metaphysical poetry provides him with ‘Newcastle is Peru’; Louis MacNeice's ‘The North begins inside’ furnishes a handy epigraph.³³ Harrison needs the tradition because no poet can work without one, but he resents it because it is a canon written and selected largely by the southern upper middle class. The extent to which Harrison's poetics are indebted to eighteenth-century formal principles has been obscured by the ambivalence towards the traditional canon expressed in his work and by his aggressively contemporary diction. His classical interests are balanced by a knowledge of twentieth-century science and technology, particularly the technology of war. In his ‘American’ poems he comes over as a man at home in the modern world of materials. His knowledge of street idiom is also formidable. But the formal poetic use to which these materials are put would not have seemed eccentric to Gray （whereas some of the materials themselves certainly would）.

If Harrison's work owes so little, not only to his contemporaries, but to twentieth-century poetry generally, could his work represent a paradigm shift, like Wordsworth and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads, or Eliot's first poems? His poetic strategy is different enough and coherent enough to be so considered, but he has few obvious followers. Like William Blake, he may well be a complete one-off. It might be argued that Simon Armitage's poetry would not have been possible without Harrison's example, but it is highly debatable, given Armitage's avowed influences—Auden, Hughes, Frank O'Hara, Weldon Kees, Robert Lowell, and Huddersfield argot. Would northern poetry have remained of only regional significance without Harrison's example? It cannot be proven, but I imagine that the Huddersfield phenomenon would have emerged just the same without him. The set of factors that made Harrison the kind of poet he is were singular and are unlikely to be repeated:

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.(34)

But it is now possible to discern a number of poets working in what might be called the New Plain Style—Harrison, Douglas Dunn, James Fenton, Carol Ann Duffy, Wendy Cope, Simon Armitage—as opposed to the postmodernist obliquities of Paul Muldoon, W. N. Herbert, Peter Didsbury, Selima Hill, Medbh McGuckian, Ian Duhig, Maggie Hannan. Sometimes Plain Style and postmodernist modes coexist within the same person. There are many ways of being plain, and the poets are unlike each other in most respects, but Harrison was the first post-war poet to write such emphatically Plain Style verse, and in that he has clearly been influential.

In the end, Harrison's achievement has been to bring a new directness into poetry. Neither the obliquities of Modernism nor the pre-digested formulations of Augustanism suit his purpose entirely, although he is much closer to the latter than the former. If poetry in the twentieth century has been largely metaphoric—seeing something always as, or at least like, something else—Tony Harrison has chosen such dramatically vivid material—the pathos of his estrangement from his parents’ world, the skinhead's incoherent challenge to humanist pieties, the potential nuclear holocaust, the Gulf War and Bosnia—that the head-on approach has worked, while so many other poets were merely beating around the bush—the bush, of course, that they took so often for a bear.

Notes

1. Douglas Dunn, ‘Importantly Live: Tony Harrison's Lyricism’, Bloodaxe 1, 255.

2. Douglas Dunn, ‘Formal Strategies in Tony Harrison's Poetry’, Bloodaxe 1, 130.

3. Gorgon, 24-5. The poem has an epigraph from Pound: ‘The art of letters will come to an end before AD 2000 … I shall survive as a curiosity.’

4. Coming, 8: ‘A cold coming we had of it.’ The poem is also in Gorgon.

5. See Ezra Pound, ‘Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, Life and Contacts’, Collected Shorter Poems of Ezra Pound （London, 1952）, 208.

6. Tony Harrison, quoted by Rosemary Burton, unpub. article.

7. See W. H. Auden, The English Auden （London, 1977）, 150.

8. The three pieces that Harrison contributed to London Magazine in 1970-1 suggest that his decision to abandon this kind of work was a loss both to criticism and to himself: ‘I am surprised that ＼George MacBeth］ has never translated this kindred spirit ＼Comte Robert de Montesquiou Fezensac］, of whose poetry it was said: “The possibilities of verse for this expression of fluent, contorted, and interminable nonsense have never been more cogently demonstrated”’ （London Magazine, 10/8 （Nov. 1970）, 94）.

9. ‘The Nuptial Torches’, SP, 60-2.

10. Robert Lowell, ‘A Quaker Graveyard off Nantucket’, Poems 1939-49 （London, 1950）, 18-19.

11. ‘Nuptial Torches’, SP, 60.

12. Douglas Dunn, ‘The Student’, Barbarians （London, 1979）.

13. ‘Me Tarzan’, SP, 116.

14. Dunn, ‘Harrison's Lyricism’, Bloodaxe 1, 255.

15. Nicholas Bagnall, A Defence of Clichés （London, 1985）.

16. Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism, ll. 297-8, Poetical Works, ed. Herbert Davis （London, 1966）, 72.

17. John Haffenden, ‘Interview with Tony Harrison’, Poetry Review, 73/4 （Jan. 1984）, 30.

18. ‘The Queen's English’, SP, 136.

19. ‘Confessional Poetry’, SP, 128.

20. Thomas Gray, Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, in Roger Lonsdale （ed.）, New Oxford Book of Eighteenth-Century Verse （Oxford, 1984）, 355-6.

21. The Kipling Treasury gave Harrison's library its ‘auspicious start’ （‘Next Door’, SP, 129）.

22. Andrew Marvell, ‘The Garden’, The Poems and Letters of Andrew Marvell, vol. 1, ed. H. M. Margoliouth, 3rd edn., rev. Pierre Legouis and E. E. Duncan-Jones （Oxford, 1971）, 53.

23. See Ch. 4 above.

24. Gray, Elegy, 355-6.

25. Samuel Johnson, Lives of the English Poets, ed. G. B. Hill, 3 vols. （London, 1905） i, 51, 441.

26. Gray, Elegy, 355-6.

27. ‘Book Ends I’, SP, 126.

28. ‘Clearing I’, SP, 144.

29. A Kumquat for John Keats, SP, 192, 195.

30. V., SP, 236, 237.

31. V., SP, 237.

32. ‘Them & ＼uz］ II’, SP, 123.

33. For ‘Facing North’, SP, 190. See Louis MacNeice, ‘Epilogue for W. H. Auden’, Letters from Iceland （London, 1937）, 259.

34. 'Heredity', SP, 111.