Collected Poems and Collected Film Poetry by Tony Harrison and Collected Poems by Anthony Thwaite

In his famous pair of sonnets Them & [UZ], Tony Harrison (1938-) recalls being told at grammar-school that his Leeds accent made him an unsuitable reciter of Keats. His lengthy revenge on the teacher in question has taken the recommended form of success (as poet, playwright and film-maker) but in the same poem he recalls that “my first mention in the Times made Tony ‘Anthony’ ”.

Anthony Thwaite (1930-), on the other hand, also partly raised in Yorkshire, has always been Anthony in print. What’s in a name? In this case, one of the literary histories of post1945 England: Oxbridge v redbrick, Anglican v atheist, Establishment v outsider, assimilation v class-consciousness, liberalism v radicalism, busy man of letters v one for whom “Poetry is all I write.”

Harrison’s most famous poem-film, v., written amid the 1984 miners’ strike, quarries the contending meanings of that letter, inviting a furious skinhead to contribute to a state-of-the-nation poem sharing the form of Gray’s decorous elegy. The poem caused a public row with its combination of obscenity and political dissent. Thwaite, on the other hand, editor and defender of Philip Larkin, once resigned from the Booker panel because he thought the chosen winner was no good. In Marxist terms, Harrison seeks to change the world, while Thwaite seeks to interpret it. Thwaite’s archeological poems and the Letters of Synesius are fascinated by the familiarity of historically remote experience, yet he is sceptical about whether the discovery and preservation of “some lost groat or cup-handle will tell me / More about life than I know already”. In contrast, Harrison’s horror of war is accompanied by a sense that a full understanding of our barbarism might guide us away from conflict.

As to valuing these poets’ very different work, as Larkin said in another context, “it’s hard to lose either, / When you have both”. Thwaite is a fine comic poet. His catalogue poem On Consulting ‘Contemporary Poets of the English Language’ is an ingenious and alarmingly copious demonstration of Yeats’s view that “we are too many”, while A Manichee makes a serious critical point about the merits of extremity by parodying Ted Hughes. Although Thwaite emerged as a poet of the 1950s movement, he took no notice of Kingsley Amis’s aversion to poems about foreign cities or works of art. No mere crowd-pleaser would take on the book-length monologue series Victorian Voices or the poems arising from his time in Japan.

Perhaps the greatest contrast between the poets lies in their attitude to form. Thwaite is an accomplished inheritor and adaptor and improviser, a knowledgeable historian of poetry, while Harrison takes hold of form (particularly the 16-line Meredithian sonnet) and shakes it. His sequence The School of Eloquence is both an autobiography and a reading of history and class. At the core is language itself – who possesses it, how it is spoken, the power it confers and price it exacts. “I’d like to be the poet my father read,” Harrison comments, but must content himself with an account of their baffled efforts to communicate, when stranded, as his mother remarks, like bookends at either end of a mantelpiece. Among his most powerful poems is Marked with D, recalling his father’s hopes of being reunited with his wife after death, “his cataracts ablaze with Heaven / And radiant with the sight of his dead wife” – but Heaven rhymes with the crematorium’s oven, where, in Harrison’s view, matters end. Nevertheless he is able, as an act of love, to evoke the grandeur of Milton’s sonnet, Methought I saw my late espoused saint. Milton is a steady presence for Harrison, as is Words-worth. Harrison, too, knows his literary history, but his relationship with the past is much more uncomfortably dialectical and quarrelsome than Thwaite’s – he finds little neutral, uncontested ground anywhere. Whatever their differences, both poets are able to animate and illuminate what the title of a memo-rably understated Thwaite poem, quoting the Book of Proverbs, calls The Dust of the World.

Available at Books First prices (inc p&p) on 0870 165 8585

Collected Poems by Tony Harrison

Viking £30 pp464

Collected Film Poetry by Tony Harrison

Faber £20 pp384

Collected Poems by Anthony Thwaite

Enitharmon £25 pp448

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