By Alan Morrison
Prolific socialist poet, playwright and verse-dramatist Tony Harrison passed away yesterday aged 88. His many works included The Loiners (1970), From the School of Eloquence (1978), A Kumkwat for John Keats (1981), The Gaze of the Gorgon (1992), and, of course, the controversial and groundbreaking cri de Coeur of Thatcherite Britain, V (1985), written and published at the height of the Miners’ Strike.
Partly a response to finding obscene graffiti on his parents’ headstones in his native Leeds, the proliferation of slang and expletives throughout V demonstrated the breadth of Harrison’s fascination with language in all its forms.
Harrison’s roots were in the British proletarian literary tradition, particularly that strand descended from the Chartist poets. Starting out as a working-class autodidact, he was elevated by a grammar school education, and went on to study the Classics at Leeds University, which in turn influenced his formalist and metrical approach to poetry.
This cultural clash of a Northern working-class background and a Classical education was symptomatic of many of Harrison’s generation, as memorably depicted, for example, in the anomic figure of Dennis Potter’s Nigel Barton (1965). Harrison was, like many other poets, playwrights and writers of distinction from similar backgrounds (not least the ‘Angry Young Men’ and Kitchen Sink schools), a product of that all-too-brief oasis of meritocratic social democracy between 1945 and 1979.
Harrison’s early work focused much on this class-dislocated anomie and sense of being elocuted out of his working-class vernacular, perhaps most memorably in ‘The Rhubarbarians’: ‘Those glottals glugged like poured pop, each/ rebarbative syllable, remembrancer, raise/ ‘mob’ rhubarb-rhubarb to a tribune’s speech/ crossing the crackle as the hayricks blaze’.
Primarily a theatre and film poet, Harrison might also be seen as a grittier literary inheritor of verse dramatist Christopher Fry. Lauded throughout his career for his political insights and ability to combine formal poetic eloquence with gritty and even scatological themes (V), Harrison demurred from his many literary accolades.
In 1999, when touted as a possible successor to Ted Hughes as Poet Laureate, Harrison promptly put paid to such a proposition with a long poem denouncing establishment-patronage of poets, titled ‘Laureate’s Block’: ‘There should be no successor to Ted Hughes…/ Nor should Prince Charles succeed our present queen/ And spare us some toady’s ode on coronation’.
In these senses, as in many others, Harrison put his socialist principles before reputational promotion. A stalwart verse-dramatist of the National Theatre, Harrison was perhaps the closest we have come to a People’s Poet, but his tendency to shun the public spotlight precluded wider recognition of such. The New Statesman in its obituary referred to Harrison as ‘an anti-laureate republican’ and ‘the people’s poet that too few people knew about.’ That is in itself a fitting epithet.
A slightly different version of this piece was published in the Morning Star on 28 September 2025 as an Appreciation of Tony Harrison titled ‘Spare us the toady’s odes’
