SOURCE: “Person to Person: Relationships in the Poetry of Tony Harrison,” in Twentieth-Century Poetry: From Text to Context, edited by Peter Verdonk, Routledge, 1993, pp. 21-31.

[In the following essay, Widdowson analyzes how Harrison's use of pronouns in his “The School of Eloquence” and Other Poems illustrates his ambivalent relationship to his parents.]

EDITOR'S PREFACE

‘You weren't brought up to write such mucky books!’is the final line in italics of Tony Harrison's poem ‘Bringing Up’. It refers to what his mother said when he showed her his first volume The Loiners, and it epitomizes the social dislocation of a working-class boy who won a scholarship to Leeds Grammar School and subsequently graduated in Classics.

In this chapter Henry Widdowson demonstrates in a sensitive reading that the way in which the grammatical categories of person （first, second, and third） are distributed across Harrison's poem ‘Long Distance II’ throws into...