The introduction to Edith Hall’s Tony Harrison: Poet of Radical Classicism opens with Harrison’s own assertion of the importance to him of the classics. It derives from a statement made at an event at the Friends’ House on the Euston Road, organized by the campaign to save the Classics department at Royal Holloway in 2011:
I owe a huge debt to the Classics. Classics has been in my bloodstream since I was eleven. I absolutely absorbed it greedily. It gave me all kinds of models of eloquence I’ve been mining ever since, in my poetry, my theatre work, and in my films. (1)
Hall treats the four metaphors in the statement, one financial, two physiological and one industrial, as insights into Harrison’s feelings about both classical literature and his poetry, in which, she argues, economics, work, material production and corporeality are constant concerns. The first three of these add up to class politics, also present, as Hall shows, in the multivalent term ‘eloquence’. Harrison’s translations, adaptations, quotations from and allusions to classical texts are shown to enact those concerns, and in subsequent chapters, war, race and gender politics are added.
Hall finds a ‘personal relationship’ between Harrison and his classical sources (1), and argues that he ‘treats ancient writers and figures as equals speaking to the contemporary public in vibrant living voices from the transhistorical community of authors with whom he interacts … Harrison’s ancients speak to him in the present tense’ (3), and Harrison speaks, loudly, opinionatedly and authoritatively, through classical texts for oppositional purposes, using ‘the deft and opportunistic annexation of classical authority by a poet not born to it’ (Patrick Deane, At Home in Time: Forms of Neo-Augustanism in Modern English Poetry (Montreal 1994), 30, cited by Hall on page 10). Though focussed on this central influence and source, Hall acknowledges the importance of others, including Byron, Keats, Shelley, Hugo, Rimbaud, Goethe, Heine, Gilbert Murray, Aimé Césaire and Milton. She places Harrison’s work within a wider tradition of working-class encounters with, and dissemination of, the Classics that she explored, with Henry Stead, in A People’s History of the Classics: Class and Greco-Roman Antiquity in Britain and Ireland 1689 to 1939 (London 2020). But she also depicts Harrison’s classicism as sui generis, neither Augustan nor Romantic, nor Early Modern, and certainly not the constrained and snobbish version of the classical education he received at Leeds Grammar School.
Following the introduction, the study progresses chronologically through Harrison’s major works, the chapters devoted to Loiners and Palladas; Phaedra Britannica; the Oresteia and Continuous; The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus and other plays and poems; the films; Fram and Harrison’s Euripides; and Polygons and other poems. The discussions of the poems are erudite and informative but the style is never less than accessible and lively. The study is part literary criticism and part biography, as the title suggests, and therefore examines Harrison’s life, loves, friendships and passions beyond Classics. Throughout, it unapologetically identifies Harrison with the poet narrator of many of the poems, referring the reader to Harrison’s own ‘unapologetic and resonant “I”’ and to classical precedents for the development of the personal ‘I’ voice (10). A literary biographer who states that they have ‘revelled for many years now in the friendship’ of their living subject and the subject’s partner (vi) may find it difficult to be critical of the writing, and this study finds little to criticize. The outlook of Harrison’s work is said to be benevolent and non-judgemental (16), ‘for all his bitterness, anticlericalism and caustic sexual honesty’, but that benevolence is selective. The roots from which scholarship divided him are described with warmth in the elegies and poems about his childhood, and the poems to his partners which are not just erotic but loving; yet that benevolence is not universal, and the poetry frequently judges and finds wanting. Understanding is shown of the skinhead in v., but he is the product of a quite crude equation: unemployment = purposelessness = poverty = vandalism. Few people or institutions are given praise or charity. In the film Metamorpheus, Harrison’s long-term friend Professor Oliver Taplin is made to stand for a crude stereotype of a lazy, greedy academic whose factual approach to literary history is contrasted with that of the rhapsodic, Muse-serving poet who can hear the healing scream of Orpheus. Given Harrison’s complaint in ‘Them & [uz] I’ about being cast as a comic, prose-speaking prole in a school performance of Macbeth, that Taplin’s dialogue is prose and only Harrison’s poetry seems pointed. Given Harrison’s emphasis on his own scholarship in his essays and introductions, the opposition scholar/poet rings false. Hall’s scholarship, however, has served her well in this work which, perhaps most valuably, traces numerous connections among Harrison’s works as well as between those works and their sources, and establishes the radical nature of Harrison’s classical receptions.
