The Scale Against Poetry: Tony Harrison’s Prose
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There is a reason other than churlishness that Philip Larkin called his first collection of miscellaneous prose Required Writing. A poet’s ‘casual prose’, as Elizabeth Hardwick called it – that is, not fiction – can often feel obligatory, a necessary accreditation on the way to professionalisation and the aegis of fellowships and residencies. By all accounts, Tony Harrison, who died last year at the age of eighty-eight, seemed mostly to have resisted the allure. Rosemary Burton, in an introduction to his life and poetry, sidesteps the issue like a muddy puddle: ‘In the past he had written the occasional short story and book review…’
In a preface from 1987, Harrison declares ‘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’. A cohesive force draws his writing for these disparate contexts together into a single body of work (Robert Lowell’s ‘one life, one writing!’), and it is poetry that takes precedence over other forms, including prose. It’s also this that Neil Astley, Harrison’s sometime editor at Bloodaxe, restates in his introduction to the inaugural Bloodaxe Critical Anthologies series in 1991, which brought together a selection of essays, articles, reviews and reminiscences as an introduction to the wider context of Harrison’s work. (It also marked, with sad irony, the high tide and subsequent ebbing of his literary stock.) Astley continues: ‘[Harrison] is one of the few poets who makes a living entirely from poetry […] and it is significant that he has done this not by relying on fellowships, grants or other handouts, nor by resorting to literary journalism.’ (Mea culpa!)
Exorbitantly expensive monographs ranked on the columbarium shelves of university libraries are hardly reliable indicators of abiding ‘importance’, but it’s worth noting nevertheless the lack of attention Harrison received in the decades leading up to his death. There are exceptions. Edith Hall’s Tony Harrison: Poet of Radical Classicism in 2021 did a good job of marrying institutional contexts to wider public interests, following on the same track as Harrison’s best work for film and TV. (Hall is a frequent guest on In Our Time so has previous in that regard.) A few years before that there was Christine Regan’s The Rimbaud of Leeds: The Political Character of Tony Harrison’s Poetry, a torpid rehashing of everything anyone has ever said about Harrison’s poetry for nearly sixty years – yes, it has a ‘divided’ nature – which managed, somehow, to get the phrase ‘white [n-word]’ past the editors. New Light on Tony Harrison, a Festschrift unlike Astley’s Anthology, did shed some new light but mostly on old themes, and none of this light illuminated the prose. But despite its lack of critical coverage, there is prose – good prose – most of it published in this magazine between 1970 and 1972.
In 2017, Faber published The Inky Digit of Defiance: Selected Prose 1966–2016, edited by Edith Hall. Before it was published, I only knew of two Harrison essays, ‘Shango the Shaky Fairy’ and ‘The Inkwell of Dr Agrippa’, both published in the Bloodaxe anthology. The Inky Digit has the same obligatory feeling. Discounting Harrison’s own introduction, all but two of the twenty-two pieces were introductions or prefaces to plays and translations, addresses to associations and societies, acceptance speeches for awards. Although they are of interest to anyone with an interest in Tony Harrison, and contain a good deal of insight into, for instance, how plays get made and by what fortuitous circumstances they succeed, there’s precious little that isn’t available in the poems. Nothing new about, say, his early life in what he calls ‘Hoggarty’ Leeds (Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy is the Rosetta Stone for Harrison criticism), his scholarship to Leeds Grammar School and the University of Leeds, the wedge education drove between him and his working-class origins, his literary affections, his love of the classics and of cinema. The prose’s function is to trellis the real work: poetry.
There are a few exceptions in which the essay as a form is mined for its alloy of scholarly knowledge, empathetic reportage, self-reflection and self-promotion, gossip and that quality of intimate, banal chitchat – what the Czech author Bohumil Hrabal called pábení, ‘palaver’ – which was precluded in Harrison’s brand of strict metre and full rhyme. They also show another side to Harrison’s seriousness. (He can be arch and ironic in the poems – not funny.) ‘Fellowship’, published in 1969 (where, I don’t know – Hall doesn’t say and the essay isn’t included in John R. Kaiser’s Bibliography), is a dispatch from Harrison’s travels to Cuba, Brazil, Senegal and Gambia as part of the UNESCO fellowship. It’s funny and desperate (‘I asked a Wolof steward where Africans stayed in Bathurst. He said with their brothers.’) and reveals, layer by indigent layer, the cynicism lurking at the heart of cultural initiatives funded by western bodies that refuse to overcome their latent, or not-so-latent, imperial prerogatives. At a dinner, Harrison speaks to the wife of a Canadian UNESCO expert:
‘In UNESCO we just do a job and never meddle in politics. We have no political opinions.’ ‘Of course,’ I said. Then, changing the distatestful subject, she went on to speak of what she felt she lacked in Brazil. ‘I lack bilberries. I lack gooseberries. I lack loganberries.’ ‘But fruit is plentiful.’ ‘Have you tasted the apples?’ she shouted back.
Penniless, he’s forced to return home early, muttering UNESCO like a broken mantra.
‘Shango the Shaky Fairy’, Harrison’s first piece of prose published by The London Magazine in 1970, drives deeper into Afro-Cuban culture and literature via the manyfold iterations of Shango, that protean, gender fluid, irascible and talismanic orisha. Of course, Shango ends up becoming a befitting emblem for the poet:
I huddle over the fire, my flesh mottling to Shango’s colours, fondling my oshe Shango, staring into the flames of the Shilbottle cobbles, flushing in Shango’s honour as I brood on punishment and love, and invoke his epiphany, here and now, in Britannia, bold and gentle, brave but neutral, an orisha in touch with the dead, the living and the yet to be, and with only double axes to grind.
But, equally, the essay is a thrilling and wide-ranging investigation into Shango’s shifting status ‘in the socialist island of Cuba and under the military dictatorship of Brazil’. Indeed, Shango may well be an object lesson in how post-colonial literature gets to the ‘post-’ stage: how it doesn’t merely jettison the colonial and blindly adopt the myths and figures of the ‘pre-’, but overlays, adapts, recalibrates, occupies the ‘lousy leasehold’. In one such passage, discussing the poet Miguel Barnet, Harrison sweeps together the personal, historical, political and cultural: ‘Impatient with the pintoresquismo of the Afro-Cuban poetry (so-called) of the 1930s, Barnet began travelling, researching and living with santeros in Palmira and Jovellanos in Matanzas, in order to know and create Cuba, correct the imbalance that an education of a North American college had given him.’ Later, speaking about Rogelio Martínez Furé, he’s more offhand, turned around by the whirl of contexts and close contacts, but to equal effect: ‘To know is to create. “We use the myths’’, said one or the other of them to me at different times, ‘‘in a revolutionary context.”’ It’s also, crucially, a not uncritical assessment:
If Cubans are learning and creating their cubanidad from a new discovery of the Afro- part of their Afro-Spanish inheritance, it is likely that it is from both strains that they inherit machismo. […] Machismo which makes a journalist attack a poet as a pederast for wearing a psychedelic tie given to him by Adrian Mitchell. A machismo every bit as suspicious and on the defensive as the Andycappismo of northern England. That machismo can undermine the revolution is the suggestion of the third part of that prize winning film, the trilogy on Cuban womanhood, Lucia, where a country macho resists his wife’s attempt to learn to read with the young alfabetizador during the great literacy campaign of 1962 and, the film clearly states, resists her taking part, her true part, in the revolution.
If the reflex charge is appropriation, it’s answered by an openness and sober engagement – what Edward Said called ‘intimacy and distance’, an engagement that never shades into proprietorship or ‘sexoticism’ (charges levelled at Picasso, Vachel Lindsay and Edith Sitwell). Sometimes the essay takes what’s unknowable on its own merits, gives it to us undigested. As Elizabeth Hardwick said of Elizabeth Bishop’s prose, it is marked ‘by a respect and tolerance for what the curiosity discovers’. Other times, he’s drawn to a fallacious corollary between the post-colonial and the ‘inner colonialism’ of working-class experience in mid-twentieth-century England. (Harrison says elsewhere about being asked to teach Wordsworth’s ‘[I wandered lonely as a cloud]’ to university students in Nigeria: ‘they didn’t know what a fucking daffodil was’.) Bringing these struggles into a common light seemed as necessary to a poet determined to ennoble all suppressed eloquence as the nineteenth-century novel was necessary to Raymond Williams’s conception of ‘Culture’, or the mortality rates of Leeds textile mills between 1818 and 1827 were for E. P. Thompson’s ‘History’. In 2026, it’s a project unlikely to win much sympathy because of its nostalgic international left-wing ambitions. But this is a poet who could raise a cry for the ‘mute ingloriousness’ of the Luddites and, in the next breath, address Marcelino dos Santos, poet and founding member of FRELIMO, the Mozambique Liberation Front, and praise his mastery of all the oppressor’s tongues – ‘French and Spanish, Portuguese and ours’ – while urging him not to repeat the oppressor’s methods:
Dulciloquist Dos Santos, swear to them
whose languages you’ll never learn to speak
that tongues of fire at a 1000 rpm
is not the final eloquence you seek.
(‘Dichtung und Wahrheit’)
He just did it in prose before he could ever do it in poetry.
These early essays are more than trellises; they propel his first collection of poetry into existence and exist independently of it. The Loiners, published in 1970 by London Magazine Editions, asks questions about the correlation between the individual sexual liberation of the sixties and the legacies of colonial exploitation at the end of empire (what he calls in one essay ‘the themes, like Zárate’s History of Peru, […] of discovery and conquest; celebration and defeat’). The essay form thaws out his tongue as much as staging a macaronic version of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, called Aikin Mata (a Hausa phrase meaning, literally, ‘women’s work’), in collaboration with student-actors at Ahmadu Bello University in Nigeria so their ‘non-standard’ English is more than a mere white approximation; and the essays certainly precede the famous self-elegy-cum-rebirth of ‘Them & [uz]’: ‘RIP RP, RIP T.W. / I’m Tony Harrison no longer you!’ It’s the image created in these essays of the clerici vagantes or wandering scholars that allows for the dramatic, impersonal, breakneck transitions of The Loiners (an early reviewer called the book ‘undoubtably the most exhausting experience within recent memory’). They are figures with free rein to flout the borders of nation, culture and history by cycling through a gallery of masks and guises: an academic exploiting young African boys for sex; the sixteenth-century Italian poet Hieronymus Fracastorius who, it’s said, ‘discovered’ syphilis in conquistadors returning from the Americas; an amorous spy behind the Iron Curtain; Queen Isabella of Spain on her wedding night. Conscious of the privilege, the authorial figure must, eventually, return home, changed, skint and barely able to speak what he’s seen. The ‘homecoming’ poem ‘Newcastle is Peru’, first published in The London Magazine, enacts this ‘appalling motion round the earth’ as a Chair-o-Plane ride: images and impressions are loosed into an untraceable orbit, become detached and unassimilable into mere ‘experience’, yet blur and cohere inside the formal pressures of poetry. The promise of the title is fulfilled and the coal (one of Harrison’s pre-eminent symbols of labour, exploitation and ultimate extinction) of both South America and Northumberland is on the poet’s hands, smudging ‘everything they feel or touch’. It’s an apt summation of the book’s themes but also of the relationship between the essays and the poetry – between what’s possible, or not, in either form.
What’s not included in The Inky Digit are any of the reviews Harrison wrote for The London Magazine. In seven written between September 1970 and December 1972, he assesses at least twenty-one books (the actual number is unclear) and the range far exceeds the remit of English reviewing in the early 1970s (or even 2020s): in one review there’s a new edition of Neruda’s Selected Poems, Beckett’s translation of the Anthology of Mexican Poetry, an anthology of new Peruvian poetry and Antonio Cisneros’s The Spider Hangs Too Far from the Ground. Even spread thin he can still bring his deep and sympathetic engagement with South American literature to bear and build the nascent redoubts of staunch critical verdict: mainly, that poetry of a narrowly self-sustaining sort is not worth the candle, will never be equal to whatever the task of poetry is – be it affective or political (if, of course, the two can be unravelled). It’s not even up to the basic desire of art: satisfying our suspicion that the world around us is not merely everything that is the case. Addressing critics and translators who’d elide the causes and predilections in Neruda – ‘his Communism and public rhetoric’ – as diversions from his ‘long contact with the Sphinx’, Harrison reminds them (and us):
In Latin America, on the contrary, they have everything to do with it, when ‘the Sphinx’ in all probability is the riddling voice of colonialism or the CIA. The business is Discovery and Conquest. Naming is also claiming. From Pizarro to United Fruit there has been the naming of parts, the signing of papers, and so the poet who is the giver of name must also be the taker away […] There are the poet’s names of discovery, and the colonist’s names of conquest; and they are inextricably linked.
In a review of Alan Bold’s The Penguin Book of Socialist Verse (how English, Harrison notes, that Sick and Animal should precede it), Harrison pulls the editor up on his many glaring omissions, mostly from Africa, South America and Cuba: most notably, perhaps, Nicolás Guillén – whose poem ‘Una canción a Stalin’ might have thrown the entire endeavour into question by its having to confront Stalinism and socialist poetics – who’d ‘witnessed a successful revolution, and has gone on recording its achievements’.
A review of a selection closer to home – Collected Poems by Clifford Dyment, About Time by P. J. Kavanagh, The Burning Cone by George MacBeth, More Collected Poems by Hugh MacDiarmid and Six Epistles to Eva Hesse by Donald Davie – begins as follows: ‘For some it is not enough that Britain is an island; it must also be a verdant piece of private, high-walled garden.’ Dyment’s cloistered view is summarily dismissed (‘Conservationist verse through and through. I prefer the Trappists. A proof-reading oversight repeats six lines of page 73 on page 74’), as is Kavanagh’s ‘smoke-blue counterpane / Of warm, eye-level mist’ (‘Even my school English master, as out of touch as most, more than 20 years ago, had counterpane images on his list of proscribed clichés’). Both, along with MacBeth and, to a lesser extent, MacDiarmid, fail to balance ‘the scale against poetry’, those counterweights that threaten, always, to overwhelm eloquence. A few years later, Harrison said in an interview with John Haffenden:
I work to give the reader of poetry maximum gratification, but he has to pay for it: that literary frisson […] will cost you so much in social awareness, in the consciousness of social gaps and divisions.
The awareness doesn’t have to be ‘the consciousness of social gaps and divisions’, but it has to be something that checks the easy, self-sustaining flow: be it social indifference, personal self-destruction, the vast ‘coal creating forces’ of time, death and oblivion, ‘the whole fatuity that writing poetry will do anything’.
The only volume of poetry to be singly reviewed flirts with this scale. Ted Hughes’s Crow, according to Harrison, satisfies the ‘poetic consciousness of our times […] to turn scavenger’. Indeed, God, in Harrison’s reading of Crow’s cosmogony, becomes the slack, gentile poet: ‘his scream for survival turns into a grin at God’s ineffectual creation’. It’s a surprising assessment when considered against what we know will become Harrison’s style. Teleologically, Harrison was not a scavenger; he collected historical flukes and personal ironies and plotted them along parallel lines. In one poem, remembering his railwayman grandfather, he says: ‘I strive to keep my lines direct and straight, / and try to make connections where I can’. It’s also gratifying to see Harrison engage with contemporaries. Harrison was something of a clade, the last in a line of dumb antecedents. For a fellow traveller to feature in a Harrison poem they usually had to be dead. (See his final poem, ‘Polygons’, published in 2015, in which both Hughes and Seamus Heaney feature among others, all dead.) Maybe being immersed for so long in institutions and more-or-less formal poetry communities (I use the term without embarrassment) has inured me to the sole-trader aesthetic. Such a reluctance to engage in the ecosphere seems impossible nowadays, if not blithely irresponsible in a way I can’t fully articulate. (One way of doing this is by reviewing but there are other, less self-aggrandising ways.)
In another review, Harrison takes account of recent American poetry: Bishop’s Collected Poems, Denise Levertov’s Relearning the Alphabet, Lorine Niedecker’s Collected Poems, Daniel Hoffman’s Broken Laws, James Merrill’s The Fire Screen and Adrienne Rich’s Snapshot of a Daughter-in-Law. I’d liked to have known what he thought about poetry across the Atlantic – of Bishop and Rich especially – since he lived there on-and-off through the late seventies and early eighties, but I wasn’t able to get a hold of these. Their unavailability, though, adds to the fugitive charm of Harrison’s prose. Read one way there are clues everywhere to his development. Read another, there’s a resistance of his own instincts. (In Hughes, Harrison notes the ‘dangers to the poet of such a liberating persona’.) He’s just getting going, and then the reviews stop.
After this, all his thinking about poetry gets channelled into the poems. When this works it works. The plays and film-poems especially have the scope and drive to work through ideas about the state of the art and the role of the poet before they run out of road, or until the parallel lines of fluke and irony meet. Even a late ‘School of Eloquence’ sonnet, ‘The Ode Not Taken’, about C. T. Thackrah (contemporary of Keats, pioneer of occupational medicine and founding member of the Leeds School of Medicine) weighs factual prose in the scale:
he found iambics no prose can destroy,
which want to stop the heart with simple fact:
we do not find old men in this employ.
But weigh these against a poem like ‘Laureate’s Block’, about not accepting the Laureateship after Ted Hughes’s death (despite not being asked), which contains a long prose hyperbaton from Thomas Gray (who also rejected it without being asked); or ‘The Grilling’, from his final book Under the Clock, which jumbles various translations of Martial – from Thomas May, Joseph Addison and Harrison himself, as well as the Latin original – in with an imaginary encounter with Goethe at the foot of Mount Vesuvius. What an essay that could’ve been. The poem is a mess.
Partly due to critical neglect, partly due to the single-minded determination to be a poet who survived on nothing but his poetry, Harrison’s prose is doomed to be a footnote in his career. Fittingly, here’s one of the few mentions of the prose in Harrison criticism, a footnote in an essay by Peter Forbes: ‘The […] pieces that Harrison contributed to London Magazine […] suggest that his decision to abandon this kind of work was a loss to both criticism and to himself’.
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Dane Holt’s writing has appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, The Stinging Fly, The London Magazine, Winter Papers and elsewhere. His debut poetry collection Father’s Father’s Father was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and was shortlisted for the John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize 2026. He lives in Belfast.
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