SOURCE: “Blasphemy and Death: On Film Making with Tony Harrison,” in Tony Harrison, edited by Neil Astley, Bloodaxe Books, 1991, pp. 384-94.

[Symes is a film editor, director, and producer for the BBC. In the following essay, he discusses working with Tony Harrison on the verse film The Blasphemers' Banquet ]

In 1936, delivering a lecture to the North London Film Society, W. H. Auden concluded that to enable poetry to work with film ‘there was a difficulty finding the right kind of support to enable such experiments to be carried out. It is financial support that is required for these experiments, without restriction on the director's independence of outlook either by commercial or departmental policy.’ This is certainly true, but he ignored the other vital part of the film/verse equation.

Possibly because what he was required to do at the GPO unit was to provide verse for existing film...