earticle

영어

Tonny Harrison is a faithful and genuine working-class poet. He was born in Leeds and educated at its Grammar School, and he studied Classic in its University. As a lectuer in English at Ahmadu Bello University in northern Nigeria, he translated Aristophanes's Lysistraia into the pidgin English of the Hausa people. He, as a freelance poet, writes poems in the voices of working-class British expatriates. He has been called 'our Best English', 'a major dramatic poet', 'a major social and a radically innovative dramatist', and 'our greatest modern theatrical poet' The subjects which have dominated Harrison's poetry are family and community, art, and war - class war. His poetic voice is inflected by political and social struggle. Though he does not restate a radical agenda for social revolution with his poems, he is neither reactionary nor narrow-minded. His literary colleagues are like to think that he is a radical rather than a literal perspective, but he is a poet resisting powerfully a violence and radicalism as a political trick. Like Larkin and Hill, Harrison has a strong sense of history, but his perspective is more political and his politics are political activities about the exploiter and oppressor. Class conflict in Harrison's poems is caused by a social atmosphere of 1930's. In this period, material greed and ideological contention are no more historically specific and no less generalized, and abstract than original sin and the darkness of the human heart. This is mystification and obscurantisms with political effects. Harrison take Gorgon as metaphor - the Kaiser for this poetic function. Ideological contention and material greed make war and social violent history. He presents these violences of history. So revulsion against war becomes a source of his lifelong moral. Harrison's lyricism, like Larkin, draws from an ability to engage with materials of ordinary life. He is the five senses, as well as the conclusions that can be drown from them. Things in his poems are the self-conscious objective correlative. As Dunn says, his work is also a poetry of subjective dilemmas and dramas. The mood of Harrison's poem has elegiac element. Elegies cannot by definition prevent or cure the specific ill. So elegy is the form of poetry natural to the reflective mind. Its subject is a past time, its form is the historical epitaph, the meditation over a vanished past. Such an epitaph is a declaration of the death of working industrial England, and a political act. Therefore, Harrison's poems has a characteristic of gloomy historical meditation.