Tony Harrison: Poet of Radical Classicism

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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 Halls 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.

Reviews

[Halls] shared interests and wide-ranging knowledge of the classical world and its reception, besides her sympathetic understanding of Harrisons outlook, make this a most engaging study. * The Classical Review *
Halls book is ... engaging and erudite. * The Scottish Left Review *
Tony Harrison is a persuasive, timely, important study which goes right to the top of any reading list of Harrison scholarship and joins the canon of class-based classical reception studies. * Translation and Literature *

Author Bio

Edith Hall is Professor of Classics at Kings College London, UK. She has published more than thirty volumes on ancient Greek and Roman literature and their reception and has been a judge of the Stephen Spender prize for literary translation and the Society for Theatre Research Book of the Year.