SOURCE: “The Drunken Porter Does Poetry: Metre and Voice in the Poems of Tony Harrison,” in Tony Harrison: Loiner, edited by Sandie Byrne, Clarendon Press, 1997, pp. 161-70.

[In the following essay, Crucefix discusses the importance of formal meter and speech to Harrison's poetry.]

1

Harrison's first full collection, entitled The Loiners after the inhabitants of his native Leeds, was published in 1970 and contained this limerick:

There was a young man of Leeds Who swallowed a packet of seeds. A pure white rose grew out of his nose And his arse was covered in weeds.(1) 

Without losing sight of the essential comedy of this snatch, it can be seen as suggestive of aspects of Harrison's career. For example, the comic inappropriateness of the Leeds boy swallowing some seeds becomes the poet's own ironic image of his classical grammar school education. As a result of this, in a deliberately grotesque image...