PoetryIn a letter he wrote in 1912 from his retreat in Villa Igea by Lake Garda in Italy, to Arthur William McLeod, one of his closest friends, the great English novelist and poet DH Lawrence railed against the country he both loved and hated: "I hate England and its hopelessness . . . I want to wash again, wash off England, the oldness and grubbiness and despair".
And in a reverie of his Italian hideaway, he rallies, "Yesterday F. [ Frieda, his partner] and I went down along the lake towards Maderno. We climbed down from a little olive wood, and swam. It was evening, so weird, and a great black cloud trailing across the lake. And tiny little lights of villages came out, so low down, right across the water. Then great lightnings spilt out. - No, I don't believe England need be so grubby". It's the kind of contradictory intensity we normally associate with Irish writers such as Joyce or Beckett when troubled thoughts of country clouded their minds.
Lawrence's exilic wanderings throughout Europe, Australia, Mexico and elsewhere almost inevitably brought his imagination back to England, and the various places in which he had grown up, crucially, as a young boy in Nottinghamshire and thence into the troubled, compassionate and estranged writer of London and Cornwall.
There is indeed a curious history to later 20th-century English writers' attitudes to their own English places: Philip Larkin's Coventry, is well known, but there is the etherealised English landscape of the much less publicly recognised poet David Gascoyne, or Basil Bunting's reimagining of his Northumbria boyhood in Briggflatts, while the wonderful Thom Gunn, more appropriately associated with San Francisco, also wrote of Hampstead as if he were Patrick Kavanagh addressing Inniskeen.
Leeds, one of the great cities of industrial England, has produced its laureate in Tony Harrison as the class history of imperial Britain is refracted through the imaginative injunctions of this poet of passionate intelligence.
Harrison is England, a version of its history, submerged now forever under the welter of post-industrial, "corporatised", Blairite reality. Harrison's poetry, in rejecting this "new world" is not all, but much, of a radical nostalgia, not unlike Lawrence's visionary precedence.
Now collected in two substantial volumes, this poetry reveals the turbulent sense of economic and cultural change as the city of his childhood and youth, and one of the cockpits of British industrial might, is charted from the pre-second World War world of homogeneous family and domestic life, through community experience - of work, religion, history, language, social customs and expectations - into a difficult and painful re-imagining of all these things, in the multicultural world of contemporary England that took root in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Roughly at the same time the industrial cornerstones of the traditional English working class were collapsing.
From the post-second World War era, the familiar path of educational transition into university brought a new generation of writers to the fore, a new generation that cast doubt and uncertainty on the establishment mores and assumptions of English cultural and economic traditions. They looked in two directions simultaneously - along the fault-lines of working-class life experiencing the pressures of economic downturn, and outwards to the wider, previously unimaginable cultural possibilities that educational opportunity had made possible. Harrison's imaginative dialectic swings between these energies and desires, artistic options and historical realities, like a Geiger counter.
Tony Harrison's Collected Poems is, like no other, the most consistent poetic testimony to the politics of these structural changes in English "national" self-consciousness. Finding the language in which to record this history, Harrison's often blunt and brutal obsessions (that on occasion teeter towards doggerel) are masked, like Samuel Johnson's, in the lithe forms of English and classical literary traditions and forms. Underpinning the lacerating dramatic exchanges between poet and skinhead in the era-defining poem of Thatcher's years, V., seen from the viewpoint of those less deceived, there runs one of the best-known idylls of English poetry, the much loved, much learned, Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard by Thomas Gray:
Jobless though they are how can these kids,
Even though their team's lost one more game,
Believe that the 'Pakis', 'Niggers', even 'Yids'
Sprayed on the tombstones here should bear the blame?
And throughout both Collected Poems and the challenging volume of Collected Film Poetry, which includes a fascinating self-portrait by Harrison in Flicks and This Fleeting Life, a portrait emerges of a public poet, enraged by the politics of his time, and making poetry out of this passion. It is not only England that features here, but the imperial afterlives of once foreign places - Nigeria, South America - the respite of love and friendship and the shocking rebirth of war in A Cold Coming, set in the last Iraqi disaster. Whether writing for the stage in New York or the television in Britain, Harrison's vigorous, vocal English comes unquestionably from the living room fireside of his Leeds upbringing, an unmistakably dramatic voice which thankfully cannot "pipe down". Essential reading, for sure.
Gerald Dawe's most recent collection of poems, Lake Geneva, is published by Gallery Press. His collected criticism, The Proper Word, was recently published by Creighton University Press. He teaches at Trinity College Dublin
Collected Poems By Tony Harrison Penguin/Viking, 452pp. £30 Collected Film Poetry By Tony Harrison Faber and Faber, 414pp. £20