SOURCE: “Classical Vandalism: Tony Harrison's Invective,” in Critical Quarterly, Vol. 32, No. 2, Summer, 1990, pp. 50-65.

[In the following essay, Woodcock discusses the anger found in Harrison's poetry and asserts that its source is Harrison's “own background … and ＼his］ sense of identity in relation to the marginalisation of working-class experience by dominant middle-class culture.”]

Tony Harrison's poetry grows more extraordinary year by year. His output is increasing dramatically, and he is getting angrier. For a practitioner of classically formal restraint, Harrison is very ready to occupy outspoken extremes of expression and opinion, as his recent productions testify. There was his long poem V. set during the miner's strike in 1984 and utilising an uncompromising invective which led Mary Whitehouse to call for it to be banned. There is his play for fifteen women about the Greenham peace camp, Common Chorus, which allows Harrison to re-launch his critique of men and masculinity...