SOURCE: “‘These Vs Are All the Versuses of Life’: A Reading of Tony Harrison's Social Elegy V.,” in In Black and Gold: Contiguous Traditions in Post-War British and Irish Poetry, edited by C. C. Barfoot, Rodopi, 1994, pp. 79-94.

[In the following essay, Haberkamm provides an in-depth analysis of Harrison's V. and describes it as “a contemporary elegy, a public poem, which opens up to its social context without dispensing with private grief and ruminations.”]

Articulation is the tongue-tied's fighting.¹

Although he began as a Tyneside poet, publishing his first collection The Loiners,² as early as 1970, Tony Harrison's present popularity is based on his achievements as a playwright （The Misanthrope, The Oresteia, The Mysteries）, mainly for the National Theatre,³ as a librettist for the Metropolitan Opera in New York （The Bartered Bride and Medea : a sex-war opera）, as a translator of classical texts and French plays, and as the...