A poet’s odyssey
SHORTLY after the British poet laureate Ted Hughes died in 1998, it was rumoured that the shortlist for a successor included Tony Harrison. Unlikely as that might have been, given the latter had few years earlier chosen to “hymn the Crown’s demise” in A Celebratory Ode on the Abdication of King Charles III, Harrison was taking no chances.
He pre-empted the possibility of such a dishonour by publishing Laureate’s Block, flaying the monarchy and its toadying enablers, declaring he wished to remain “free to blast and bollock Blairite Britain”. Such sentiments, unsubtly expressed, earned him the wrath of a cultural establishment that had hitherto tended to acknowledge, if not always hail, this poet’s exceptional erudition and eloquence.
I first encountered Tony Harrison, who died last Friday at 88, in the pages of The Guardian in 1991 when the newspaper published A Cold Coming, a scathing critique of that year’s Iraq war (and, in fact, all such conflicts) delivered in rhyming verse. The poet imagines himself interviewing a grotesquely charred Iraqi soldier (whose image was indeed published worldwide) reflecting on the life he might have enjoyed.
The extended poem’s familiar form and unflinching content were both revelatory. (If memory serves, we managed to reproduce it in the Khaleej Times.) Sentiments such as “Stars and Stripes in sticky paws/ may sow the seeds for future wars./ Each Union Jack the kids now wave/ may lead them later to the grave” pushed me to seek out more of Harrison’s poetry.
Tony Harrison was a towering literary presence.
It was probably in an early edition of his selected works that I came across v., an even longer poem from 1985, inspired by the obscene graffiti on Harrison’s parents’ graves in a Leeds cemetery. The offended poet is also the potential offender in what can be read as a searing indictment of Thatcherite Britain, with its heightened class war and accelerated decay. He does not flinch from spelling out the four-letter words, and the right-wing media as well as Tory MPs fumed at the idea of Channel 4 airing a filmed version of the poem in 1987, with the Daily Mail excoriating it as “a torrent of filth”.
More generally, however, serious critics did not doubt its merit as a groundbreaking literary achievement that accurately reflected the protagonists’ dialect and dilemmas. Although written during the miners’ strike 40 years ago, it resonates in a context of a conflicted post-Brexit Britain where the Starmer Labour government’s dismal performance has opened up the prospect of US-style fascism under Nigel Farage.
And the same Blair taken to task in Holy Tony’s Prayer in 2003 for his leading role in the second Bush war against Iraq now preens himself as the presumptive viceroy of a post-Palestinian Gaza.
Tony Harrison was an unusual poet not only in the forms of expression he chose but also because of his working-class origins and a northern vernacular he refused to abandon. Born in Leeds in 1937 to unlettered parents, he won a grammar school scholarship that enabled him to study Latin and Greek. His subsequent translations and adaptations of the ancients as well as post-Enlightenment luminaries testify to his command over European languages, yet the first play he was instrumental in staging was in freshly post-independence Nigeria, where Aikin Mata, a pidgin version of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, was evidently a huge success. After four years in Nigeria, Harrison also spent time in Cuba and Czechoslovakia (the Soviet and Cuban stamps on his passport made him persona non grata in military-ruled Brazil).
He recited his poetry at Moscow University in the 1960s, and in the following decade frequently visited Leningrad during his stint as a lyricist for George Cukor’s US-Soviet co-production of The Blue Bird, a monumental flop. But it afforded Harrison valuable lessons in filming, enhanced by a viewing of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Mirror. His translations and adaptations had already caused a stir at Britain’s National Theatre, and he later added film-poems to his achievements. They included Prometheus, updated to a modern context and The Shadow of Hiroshima, marking the 50th anniversary of the atomic bombing, among others.
Throughout his life, Harrison was driven by the urge to give voice to those deprived of one. For this he was adored by many, but also intensely hated by a few. Despite his theatrical and screen accomplishments, he wanted to be known only as a poet — and in that capacity, he stood head and shoulders above contemporaries in the English-speaking world. Given his love of Greece, it’s no surprise he wanted his ashes to be scattered around Delphi. The profundity of his words, meanwhile, will hopefully continue to be heeded far beyond Greek and British shores.
Published in Dawn, October 1st, 2025