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Public Poetry in the Work of Tony Harrison

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Public Poetry in the Work of Tony Harrison Masaryk University in Brno Faculty of Arts Department of English and American Studies English Language and Literature Lenka Filipová Public Poetry in the Work of Tony Harrison B.A. Major Thesis Supervisor: Stephen Hardy, Ph.D. 2006 I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently, using only the primary and secondary sources listed in bibliography. 2 Acknowledgements Many thanks to my supervisor, Steve Hardy Ph.D., for providing me with some valuable sources and for his kind help. 3 Table of Contents Introduction..........................................................................................................................5 1 Poetry in public .................................................................................................................7 2 The School of Eloquence ....................................................................................................9 2.1 Themes.......................................................................................................................10 2.2 Form ..........................................................................................................................20 3 “V.” ..................................................................................................................................25 3.1 Themes.......................................................................................................................25 3.2 Form ..........................................................................................................................32 Conclusion ..........................................................................................................................36 Notes ...................................................................................................................................38 Bibliography .......................................................................................................................39 4 Introduction Tony Harrison is a prolific English poet and translator, born in Leeds in 1937 and educated at Leeds Grammar School and Leeds University. His working-class background provides the material for much of his poetry that explores the cultural rift between his middle- class position and his working-class boyhood. Harrison’s work has a great scope and variety – from sonnets and film-poems to plays and opera libretti. Harrison’s poetry is also known for its serious expression of his social ideas and he is sometimes called a working-class, political or public poet. In my thesis, I wish to explore the ‘publicness’ of Harrison’s poetry. I have decided to focus on a collection of poems called The School of Eloquence (1978) and a long poem “V.” (1985) that was televised in 1987 as these parts of his work have become familiar to many English readers and are considered to express political meanings. The first chapter of my thesis provides a short explanation of what the word ‘public’ in conjunction with the word ‘poetry’ might mean. It explains that the wish to write public poetry is an old one and that to make poetry public, to make it speak to an appropriately wide public and, at the same time, keep its seriousness, themes are as important as form. In the second chapter, I am going to focus on The School of Eloquence . The first subsection of this chapter tries to explore the main themes that Harrison deals with in the collection. Rather than discuss all the poems in the collection, I have decided to choose some poems as representative. The second subsection discusses the formal aspects of the poems. It focuses on poetic form and use of language. I will also speak about the significance of Harrison’s use of the iambic pentameter. The third chapter’s focus is upon the long poem “V.” As with the discussion of The School of Eloquence , in the first subsection I will identify the main themes of the poem. The second subsection of the third chapter deals with the form of the poem. I am going to look at 5 its metre and some specialities of Harrison’s use of language. As some of the formal aspects of the poem provoked a great debate in the media, this subsection also concentrates on some press articles and thus provides a discussion of the public response. 6 1 Poetry in public It can be argued that besides poetry of a predominantly intimate and contemplative nature there is poetry that has much in common with politics. Poetry can be concerned with rights and values and it can suggest possible social changes and improvements. In the history of English literature, there are many poets who tried to make their readers realise that things could be otherwise. They tried to give their poetry a reformatory urge and they wished to reach as wide a public as possible. Their aim was to write public poetry. In his study of English poetry and its ideas of nationhood England and Englishness , John Lucas speaks about William Blake’s work as “wresting poetry away from the dead hand of institutional powers and returning it to the people” (79). He proclaims that Blake’s Songs of Innocence are politically radical poems and shows how Blake identifies his poetry with a revolutionary impulse and thus tries to recover Milton’s radical heritage. Lucas also points out that, in some of his works, Blake uses language that most readers can confidently identify with. This also applies to William Wordsworth who rejected the convention of picturesque and wanted to use “the real language of man” (Lucas 91). Lucas also points to the fact that in 1 some of his work, Wordsworth was preoccupied with political and public reform. The wish to write public poetry was also very common in the 19th century. The work of poets of that period is a central concern of Isobel Armstrong’s study Victorian Poetry . In one of the chapters in this book, Armstrong explores the work of Arthur Hugh Clough and his intention to address the interests of bourgeois and working-class readers. She investigates the way he evolved “a form to which politics was intrinsic and a language which was necessarily a democratic language” (178) and points to Clough’s poems’ thematic connection with radical Chartism, a movement often led by middle-class liberal writers, orators and politicians agitating on behalf of the working-class. In later chapters of her book, Armstrong moves from the period before 1848 predominantly characterised by poetry of protest to the 1850s and 7 concentrates on the work of Robert Browning among others. She explores his dramatic monologue and its ability to become political art questioning the meaning of power and 2 democracy. The wish to bring poetry into a mutually beneficial relationship with politics and address as many readers as possible is an old one and to this day it is a focal point of some poets and literary critics. Tony Harrison is one of the poets who proclaim themselves public poets. In his statement he explains: 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. (Harrison) While saying that he wants to write public poetry, he also claims that he does not want to rid his poetry of its intimate nature, its “inwardness”. Further on, he explains that he also wants to speak to a broad public and not just academia: […] 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 anointed. (Harrison) Obviously, he is aware of the fact that poetry is a genre that is most often read at universities and that the poetry reading public is not a broad one. It seems that he, a scholar himself, suggests that he wants to liberate poetry from its academic environment where it is most often discussed and make it ‘more comprehensible’ to a common reader. The desire to make poetry ‘public’, to make it communicate ‘directly and immediately’ and at the same time to keep its ‘inwardness’ is a challenging one. First, such poetry cannot pay attention only to personal experience but it also has to turn its attention to social issues. That is what Sue Hubbard reflects upon in her essay “Poetry in Public”. She claims: Poetry, as public art, has a place in this redefinition of how we wish society to look in the 21st century. The tenets of late modernism asserted that art had no ‘useful’ social role. Art existed only for art’s 8 sake, self-defining, self-critical, and self-reflexive. But there seems now a growing desire for openness, contact, accessibility and wholeness. This new emphasis heightens the role of the communal and the environmental, but in its non-elitist approach still leaves space for individual day dreaming. (Hubbard) This quotation explains that for poetry to become public it is necessary for it to have a form of social commitment. Second, the intention of making poetry public has implications for its form, language and tone. As Hubbard comments on the form of public art, “the work needs to have a visual and conceptual dynamic, a spatial rhythm to echo its poetic musicality” (Hubbard). Andrew Motion summarises this in his comment on the public nature of Tennyson’s “Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington” and “Charge of the Light Brigade”: It is the language of the Ode and of the Charge which defines their publicness as
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