“... with something like guilty pleasure (the critic aware that he might be contradicting himself?) to Tony Harrison’s rough and gutsy A Cold Coming. Yes, it’s polemic, ignores all those important Yeatsian lessons, will speak only to those of like mind and will lose a good deal of its point as the events recede into history. Nevertheless I’m glad in the ...”

“... home? Answering the pulls and torsions of that question produces much of the verse of Heaney, Harrison and Dunn, but it also produces very different kinds of poetry. Martianism had nothing to do with Mars, everything to do with home, the place where Craig Raine (like Murray or Dunn) feels richest. Surely Martianism comes from the ‘Ithaca’ section of ...”

“... being jeered at. One of the best things written about and around football is the poem ‘V.’ by Tony Harrison, first published in this journal, in 1985. The poem has scenes of desolation which include the desecration of graves by Leeds United supporters: when going to clear the weeds and rubbish thrown on the family plot by football fans, I find ...”

“... composers he could. Henze accepted it (Elegy for Young Lovers, The Bassarids); Tippett and Harrison Birtwistle resisted. The latter has worked fruitfully (the small-scale pieces Bow Down and Yan Tan Tethera) with Tony Harrison, another poet avid for theatrical and operatic activity; and his most recent ...”

“... authenticity and vogueishness – have been dealt with explicitly by other writers: Douglas Dunn, Tony Harrison, Linton Kwesi Johnson, John Agard, Grace Nichols and Tom Leonard, to name a few. For some, ‘literary art’ is a territory to be attained (Harrison’s ‘we’ll occupy/ your lousy ...”

“... did, as well as more recent experimenters such as Hopkins, John Berryman or the sub-Prynnean Tony Lopez. Donne and Hopkins used sonnets as vehicles for religious anguish because it’s so easy to suggest that they’re buckling under pressure, that the spirit will not run true to the form, or to God. The sonnet has a structure that invites mild ...”

“... No, I certainly hadn’t read William Percy.’Lennard likewise had the good sense to inquire of Tony Harrison and Jon Stallworthy as to his speculations about their parentheses. (Confirmed, though not thereby proved.) He and we wouldn’t have to take the poets’ word for it, but how odd of differently-minded critics to want to shut their ears to the ...”

“... text of ‘Spain’, defended by E.P. Thompson in ‘Outside the Whale’.) Some critics would see Tony Harrison as a leading continuer of the radical tradition. Where Hill eschews the prosaic, Harrison courts it, pushing poetry to the brink of banality in the manner of the Lyrical Ballads, trying always for the maximum ...”

“... is a sophisticated barbarism, and Modernism’s heirs are the self-styled barbarian poets, such as Tony Harrison, Douglas Dunn, Les Murray or Seamus Heaney. They are the poets who more and more expose what Davie would call the ‘blind spots’ of crumbling English cultural imperialism. In the Scottish tradition, Davie is good on the links between ...”

“... though to remind us that the Return of the Sonnet is a creative, as well as Lit Crit, phenomenon, Tony Harrison and Seamus Heaney offer texts from The School of Eloquence, dis/continuous with Continuous, and from the autobiographical Clearances. Wallace Stevens could not be further from these political family sonnets. Indeed, no American – even one ...”

“... allow that they really do excel – in an opposite manner. Andrew Miller does Paul the Silentiary, Tony Harrison does Palladas and Humphrey Clucas does Catullus into a harsh but wholly English English which is true to the fiercely direct sexuality of the originals. We in the 20th century can do what Pope, with all his dexterity in bawdy, could not. It ...”

“... The new generation of poets, dominated by the Big H brands (Geoffrey Hill, Ted Hughes, Tony Harrison, Seamus Heaney), were prosodically and thematically more ambitious. And the cultural mood of the later decades of the 20th century was not indulgent to the perceived misogyny and Little Englandism of Larkin and Amis when biographies and ...”

“... while Larkin’s (misdescribed) nostalgia is unallowable, some forms of nostalgia are allowed: Tony Harrison is commended for the way in which he contrasts ‘the end of the Second World War with later decades, attempting to account for the collapse of the postwar consensus so conspicuous after the Thatcher government came to power’. As the 1970s ...”

“... that is in itself quite an achievement. Instead, we have the admirable poems of Michael Longley, Tony Harrison, and particularly Douglas Dunn, whose Terry Street poems are models of their kind. Equally successful – permanent anthology figures – are Tony Harrison’s Uncle Joe, the stammering printer in ...”

“... Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, its postwar section makes room for Monty Python but not Geoffrey Hill, or Tony Harrison, or Thom Gunn, or Ted Hughes, or Craig Raine, or James Fenton, or Paul Muldoon, all of whom the Norton squeezes in at the eleventh hour. Ricks, for whom Heaney provides an effective endpoint, is probably right that many anthologies falter with ...”