Harrison Context: Harrison Flashcards
Where and when was Harrison born?
Born in Leeds in 1937.
Where did Harrison grow up?
Grew up in Beeston, a suburb in the south-east of the city.
What jobs did Harrison’s parents have?
His father was a baker and his mother a housewife.
What was Harrison’s education like?
He attended his local junior school and at the age of eleven, won a scholarship to the prestigious Leeds Grammar School. The school buildings were situated close to the University, where he went on to study Classics.
Harrison after graduation
After graduation he taught at universities in Nigeria and Prague, His first two volumes of poetry, The Loiners (1970) and The School of Eloquence (1978), explored issues of class and power, as well as his own often difficult relationship with his parents.
What theatre has Harrison worked extensively with?
Harrison has worked extensively with the Royal National Theatre, which has performed a number of productions based upon his translations of classic Greek and French drama.
What poem was broadcast on national television, causing controversy?
In 1987, a television programme by Channel 4 featuring a reading by Harrison of his poem V, led to considerable controversy, mainly on account of the use of four-letter words in the poem.
What did Tony Harrison do after the Televised reading of ‘V.’?
Subsequently, Harrison wrote a number of poems specifically intended for television, with the verse read in conjunction with film footage. These included The Shadow of Hiroshima’
(1995), which was set in the city on which the first atomic bomb was dropped forty years earlier and ‘The Blasphemers’ Banquet” (1989), a defence of the principle of freedom of expression.
Reoccuring themes in Harrison’s Poetry (conflict)
Harrison has always written extensively on war.
He visited Bosnia during the conflict there in 1995 and has written poems about this situation.
His 1991 poem ‘A Cold Coming’, commissioned by the Guardian newspaper, accompanied photograph of the burnt corpse of an Iraqi soldier in the first Gulf War.
In 2005 the Independent newspaper published a poem entitled
“Shrapnel”, in which Harrison looks back to a bombing raid on Leeds in 1942, which affected his own area of Beeston.
This was written in the aftermath of the ‘7|7’ bombings in London, two of the perpetrators having been from Beeston.
The effect of Harrison’s education
Harrison struggles to define himself as a poet; he is not at ease with this role and finds discomfort with his position as a political writer.
Harrison’s upbringing and life have greatly influenced the narrative voices he creates - he uses ordinary, everyday regional accents and gives voices to those without one.
However, Harrison’s schooling and education allowed him to cross into a different world which therefore removed him from his working class roots and he found it impossible to reconnect with what he had left behind.
Therefore does he have the right to speak for that social class as his education means he is no longer one of them? Yet if he doesn’t speak for them then who will? This is one of the central conflicts that features In this selection of poetry.
Tony Harrison & Success
Tony Harrison’s success stems from the fact that he is a classicist from the working class; a scholar seeking a mass audience.
His most controversial narrative poem V, prompted by vandals desecrating his parents’ gravestones during the miner’s strike, achieved front page headlines, was broadcast on Channel 4 in 1987 and won a Royal Television Society Award.
