Tony Harrison: Poet of Radical Classicism

Description

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. Cover page Halftitle page Series page Title page Copyright page Contents Acknowledgements Timeline of Tony Harrison’s Classics-Informed Works Series’ Editor Preface 1 ‘Models of eloquence’: Radical Classicism Idiosyncratic classicism The transhistorical republic of writers The trapeze of poetic form Radical classicism Poem as turning-point: ‘Newcastle is Peru’ 2 ‘Stone bodies’: Statuary and Classicism in The Loiners (1970) and Palladas (1975) 3 ‘Frontiers of appetite’: Phaedra Britannica (1975) Introduction Harrison’s Anglo-Indian tragic household Classical antiquity and India Hunting, lust and empire Phaedra with consequences 4 ‘Shaggermemnon’: Aeschylus’ Oresteia and Continuous (1981) Dying mothers and fathers Anglo-Saxon meets Greek She-gods and wolf mothers against the patriarchy Ad Patrem and the class struggle 5 ‘All the versuses of life’: ‘v.’ and Medea: A Sex-War Opera (1985) ‘No more Greek’ ‘The old male-concocted curse’: Medea: A sex-war opera Euripidean Medea Misogynist Hercules Apollonian Argonauts 6 ‘Bookworm excreta’: The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus (1988) and Other Plays and Poems A theatre of matter Harrison’s classical scatology Tracking Oxyrhynchus excreta Epicurean arse verse ‘Stoic crap’: The Kaisers of Carnuntum ‘Cementing over cemeteries’: The Labourers of Herakles (1995) 7 ‘End to end in technicolour’: Prometheus (1998) and Other Films ‘Prosodic motion’ ‘Grunting to the barbed-wire lyre’: The Gaze of the Gorgon (1992) ‘Doomed Argonauts’: A Maybe Day in Kazakhstan (1994) ‘History and lack of hope’: Prometheus (1998) ‘The scream of Orpheus’: Metamorpheus (2000) 8 ‘Witnessed horror’: Fram (2008) and Harrison’s Euripides Euripides in Sevastopol Harrison’s Hecubas Fram : ‘always-open-eyes’ Gilbert Murray’s example The stones of Crimea 9 ‘Surviving the slopes of Parnassus’: ‘Polygons’ (2015) and Other Poems Autobiography of a radical poet-classicist Harrison’s muses ‘Polygons’ The golden harp Notes Bibliography Index