SOURCE: “Poetry in Public,” in Times Literary Supplement, No. 4218, June 6, 1986, pp. 615-16.

[In the following review, Murray argues that Harrison's strength is in the public poetry of the theater and therefore better enjoyed in performance than in the solitary act of reading his Dramatic Verse 1973-1985.]

Every generation or so the rebirth of poetic drama is proclaimed; Tony Harrison （like myself） is just old enough to remember the excitement of the last renaissance, associated with the names of T. S. Eliot and Christopher Fry. The plays of that period are not much revived; even in the case of Eliot they remain a minor part of a major poet's work. They seem to belong to an alien culture, to be the last fling of an even earlier renaissance in the Edwardian age, when verse drama was a major industry, and the verse translations of Gilbert Murray packed the West...