Editorial

‘The new day dawns. O days! My spirit greets
the kumquat with the spirit of John Keats.
O kumquat, comfort for not dying young,
both sweet and bitter, bless the poet’s tongue!
I burst the whole fruit chilled by morning dew
against my palate. Fine, for 42!’

          from Tony Harrison’s ‘A Kumquat for John Keats’ (PNR 21, 1981)

In Index on Censorship (2, 1996) Nadine Gordimer quotes Walter Benjamin: ‘One of the foremost tasks of art has always been the creation of a demand which could be fully satisfied only later.’ This was Tony Harrison’s mature achievement. At his radical best, when he was writing some of the poems first featured in the 1980s in this magazine, in particular ‘A Kumquat for John Keats’, the ‘Art and Extinction’ sequence (PNR 22, 1981) and others in following years, he created the central body of poetry that found and will find him readers. In the 1980s people knew Harrison was the real thing.

His death reminded us of his service to the languages of poetry and of theatre. He opened the English ear to listen in unaccustomed and eventually grateful ways. He made it possible for writers with un-standard Englishes – at home and abroad – to tune their instruments and tell their peculiar truths to readerships and audiences his own work had helped to prepare. He learned to distrust the ‘eloquence’ he had striven to acquire, that put his poetry beyond the range of his community – his parents, his neighbours. The desire to include them, in particular, among his readers and auditors was transformative. In 1991, in an interview with Clive Wilmer in these pages, he said of his television poem ‘V’:

Everything about it was deliberately public and public certainly means – in our terms – television, so that I was very glad that it was on television. That’s the kind of audience I feel poetry should have. I certainly didn’t put in four-letter words in order to make a scandal – they were an essential part of the poem; it’s a poem which ranges from the graveyard’s use of Latin for epitaphs down to the ‘fuck’ and the ‘shit’ that are inscribed on the graves. And these are examples of modes of language – both of which have their own kinds of power and the poem really is about power and the power over language.

In 2000 he published Laureate’s Block with Penguin books, the imprint itself evidence of his popularity. For his devoted readers, the book was a disappointment, in part because it was familiar, even predictable, in its polemic. He disliked the honours system: when his name was mentioned after Ted Hughes’s death in connection with the Poet Laureate’s post, he made it as plain as the nose on Cyrano’s face that he would have no truck with honours. New Labour was but old Tory writ large. He wrote the awful title poem ‘Laureate’s Block’, first published in the Guardian, advising the Queen that she could… that she could look elsewhere for her official purveyor of verse. He started his Laureate’s Block collection with ‘A Celebratory Ode on the Abdication of King Charles III’, inviting comparison with Marvell’s Horatian Ode and claiming kinship with Milton. His verse had become not only coarse-textured but coarse; he does no honour to the poets from whom he seeks legitimacy. Marvell and Milton were men of political action, not gesturers and pantomimists. Ted Hughes was not at his best as Laureate: Tony Harrison was not at his best as anti-laureate. That chalice is poisoned whichever side you drink from.

Doggerel, a knowing doggerel that runs unstaunchably, tortured until the couplets and quatrains rhyme: this quondam laureate of the common man, this voice that seemed to bring alive the accents and issues of the political left and the hitherto disenfranchised with a powerful, generous intelligence, had lost its formal rigour. ‘Hopefully the day is dawning / when Britons lose their taste for fawning / on Lords and ladies, Dames and Knights / dubbed by bepurpled parasites / and will demand a Bill of Rights.’ His poetry through Continuous (1981) was subtler, nuanced. It was not ‘overheard’, as Yeats said poetry should be, but heard, a voice demanding attention. His famous use of four-letter words in ‘V’ (1985) had the effect of turning up the volume. At this later stage his poetry became political noise.

Yet Harrison wrote major poems that affected civic conscience no matter what the politics of the reader. The Meredithian sonnets of ‘Continuous’, ‘A Kumquat’ and even ‘V’ remain powerful. It may have been a short step, a miscalculation, to the stridency of the Gulf War poems, but his poetry actually engaged the Gulf War and other urgent issues of their day. The poems aren’t quite good enough to stay news, but the earlier poems retain an undiminished charge. At his best, he was and is a liberator. The kind Walter Benjamin had in mind.

Tony Harrison, born 30 April 1937, died 26 September 2025