The Rimbaud of Leeds : a contextual study of the politics of Tony Harrison's poetry 1970-1985

Abstract

The Rimbaud of Leeds is a literary contextual study of the political meanings of important poems by the Leeds poet Tony Harrison (1937- ). It is based on an examination of Harrison's non-dramatic original poetry that appears in The Loiners (1970), The School of Eloquence (1978-81), and the separately published v. (1985). Reference is made to other germane works and to Harrison's account of his work in interviews and prefaces. The principal focus of the thesis is the political character of the poetry. The poems selected for examination are exemplars of what I argue is Harrison's radical humanist and republican poetic, and of how issues of class and colonialism are interrelated in the poetry. The thesis locates the works in previously unnoticed or neglected contexts, and shows the critical importance of history for understanding the poems. It reveals Harrison's detailed engagement with the politics and history of England and Africa in particular. New contextual information necessary for understanding the political, historical, biographical and literary references in the poems is offered in this study. This dissertation attempts to sketch the key political and aesthetic features of the poetry. For the first time in Harrison scholarship, his poetry is seen as presenting an entwined biographical and political mythology for the Northern English working class. Harrison is here interpreted as a cosmopolitan Leeds poet whose Northern working{u00AD}class background, education and travels are the empirical materials of a highly cultured poetry of place. He emerges as a partisan political poet whose poems draw critical attention to an unequal relationship, in literature and in history, between the North and South in Britain. It is shown that an internationalist humanist sense of fraternity between the working class in the North of England and colonized peoples past and present suffuses the poetry. Particular attention is accorded to the presence in Harrison's political poetry of the poets John Milton (1608-74) and Arthur Rimbaud (1854-91). Milton is especially important for Harrison as a great republican poet. Rimbaud is of the first importance for Harrison's idea of himself as a poet. The significance of the life and work of Rimbaud has not been recognized in the scholarship on Harrison. This study seeks to illuminate Harrison's elective affinity with Rimbaud, and to show how Rimbaud haunts his imagination. This study argues that Harrison's political convictions and literary elective affinities have been consistent across the fifteen year span of the poetry selected for examination. This thesis indicates the dense allusive fields of the poetry and attends to the political and literary histories that enrich it. The aim in the thesis is to offer the first fully detailed contextual account of these remarkable poems and their politics.