Written during the Gulf War for The Guardian, the title poem is Harrison's response to Ken Jarecke's potent photo of a charred Iraqi soldier on the road to Basra. As a poet Harrison doesn't fool around.... There's something about his working-class temperament that hasn't time nor patience for metaphor and the grand abstraction. A Cold Coming is delivered rapid-fire in ninety-two clipped, rhymed couplets that never wear on the ear, driving the piece with relentless wit, heartbreak and a sick humor that is probably the only sane way to deal with the enormity of the subject...Harrison is a major poet, a tough and tender-minded realist fully aware of his spiritual contradictions. -- Willamette Week. Harrison's poetry is fuelled by the strongest feeling and most exhilarating erudition, and attains a quite remarkable singularity. -- TLS.

This is the first book-length study of the classicism of Tony Harrison, one of the most important contemporary poets in England and the world. It argues that his unique and politically radical classicism is inextricable from his core notion that poetry should be a public property in which communal problems are shared and crystallised, and that the poet has a responsibility to speak in a public voice about collective and political concerns. Enriched by Edith Hall's longstanding friendship with Harrison and involvement with his most recent drama, inspired by Euripides' Iphigenia in Tauris, it also asserts that his greatest innovations in both form and style have been direct results of his intense engagements with individual works of ancient literature and his belief that the ancient Greek poetic imagination was inherently radical. Tony Harrison's large body of work, for which he has won several major and international prizes, and which features on the UK National Curriculum, ranges widely across long and short poems, plays, translations and film poems. Having studied Classics at Grammar School and University and having translated ancient poets from Aeschylus to Martial and Palladas, Harrison has been immersed in the myths, history, literary forms and authorial voices of Mediterranean antiquity for his entire working life and his classical interests are reflected in every poetic genre he has essayed, from epigrams and sonnets to original stage plays, translations of Greek drama and Racine, to his experimental and harrowing film poems, where he has pioneered the welding of tightly cut video materials to tightly phrased verse forms. This volume explores the full breadth of his oeuvre, offering an insightful new perspective on a writer who has played an important part in shaping our contemporary literary landscape.

AbbreviationsForeword, Lord GowrieIntroduction: Tony Harrison's Public Poetry, Sandie Byrne1. The Best Poet of 1961, Desmond Graham2. Tony Harrison the Playwright, Richard Eyre3. v. by Tony Harrison, or Production No. 73095, LWT Arts, Melvyn Bragg4. On Not Being Milton, Marvell, or Gray, Sandie Byrne5. Open to Experience: Structure and Exploration in Tony Harrison's Poetry, Jem Poster6. Culture and Debate, Christopher Butler7. Book Ends: Harrison's Public and Private Poetry, N.S. Thompson8. Tony Harrison and the Guardian, Alan Rusbridger9. Doomsongs: Tony Harrison and War, Rick Rylance10. The.

In his lucid critical study Joe Kelleher brings Tony Harrison's diverse output together under coherent themes, from his early published verse The Loiners (1970), to his accomplished translation and adaptation of The Oresteia (1981), through to his recent work for stage and television including The Shadow of Hiroshima (1995).

Tony Harrison and the Classics comprises fifteen chapters examining the lasting importance of Tony Harrison's classical education, the extent of the influence of Greek and Roman texts on his subjects, themes, and styles, his contribution to knowledge and understanding of classical literature, his popularization of classical works, and his innovative treatment of classical drama in plays which have been performed globally. Harrison's work fosters debates about the role and perception of the classics and adaptations of classical literature in relation to education, 'high' and 'popular' culture, accessibility, and reception. A unifying theme of the collection is the way in which Harrison finds in classical literature fruitful matter for the articulation and dramatization of his longstanding preoccupations: language, class, access to art, and the causes and effects of war. Through his adaptations and translations, Harrison uses classical drama to stage interventions in modern politics, but neither idealizes nor romanticizes the ancient world, depicting inequality, bigotry, greed, and brutality.

Tony Harrison and the Classics comprises fifteen chapters examining the lasting importance of Tony Harrison's classical education, the extent of the influence of Greek and Roman texts on his subjects, themes, and styles, his contribution to knowledge and understanding of classical literature, his popularization of classical works, and his innovative treatment of classical drama in plays which have been performed globally. Harrison's work fosters debates about the role and perception of the classics and adaptations of classical literature in relation to education, 'high' and 'popular' culture, accessibility, and reception. A unifying theme of the collection is the way in which Harrison finds in classical literature fruitful matter for the articulation and dramatization of his longstanding preoccupations: language, class, access to art, and the causes and effects of war. Through his adaptations and translations, Harrison uses classical drama to stage interventions in modern politics, but neither idealizes nor romanticizes the ancient world, depicting inequality, bigotry, greed, and brutality.

This book argues that Tony Harrison’s poetry is barbaric. It revisits one of the most misquoted passages of twentieth-century philosophy: Theodor Adorno’s apparent dismissal of post-Holocaust poetry as ‘impossible’ or ‘barbaric’. His statement is reinterpreted as opening up the possibility that the awkward and embarrassing poetics of writers such as Harrison might be re-evaluated as committed responses to the worst horrors of twentieth-century history. Most of the existing critical work on Harrison focuses on his representation of class, which occludes his interest in other aspects of historiography. The poet’s predilection for establishing links between the atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the prospect of global annihilation is examined as a commitment to oppose the dangers of linguistic silence. Hence Harrison’s work can be read fruitfully within the growing field of Holocaust Studies: his texts enter into arguments about the ethics of representing traumatic incidents that still haunt the contemporary. Harrison’s status as a ‘non-victim’ author of the events is stressed throughout. His writing of the Holocaust, allied bombings and atom bomb is mediated by his reception of the events through newsreels as a child, and his adoption and subversion, as an adult poet, of traditional poetic forms such as the elegy and sonnet. This book also discusses the ways in which Holocaust literature engages with a number of concepts challenged or altered by the historical events, such as love, mourning, memory, humanism, culture and barbarism, articulacy and silence.