THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

ut no cascade of light.
Keep your eye clear
as the bleb of the icicle,
trust the feel of what nubbed treasure
your hands have known.’
This is no retreat into the historical memory but a discovery of a poetic potential as liberating as Yeats’s ‘terrible
beauty’. The Scandinavian burial mound, with its recalls of Beowulf and Sutton Hoo, offers an epiphanic
transcendence of history. Heaney’s verse published since Field Work —Station Island (1984), The Haw Lantern
(1987), and Seeing Things (1991) — suggests a further extension of the exploration of language, place, and memory
begun in the sensuous early poetry and so sharply crystallized in North.
The verse of an equally prolific English poet, Tony Harrison (b. 1937), has also consistently investigated the
significance of native sounds and native roots. Harrison, born and educated in Leeds, and resident in Newcastle, has,
despite his frequent reference to a wider world beyond Britain, emerged as an emphatically urban poet. More
particularly, he is a poet of the industrial North of England who has explored the cultural rift that divides his educated
adult eloquence and ‘sophistication’ from the abrupt reticence of his working-class boyhood. He introduces The
School of Eloquence (1978) with two quotations, the first (from which his own title derives) from E. P. Thompson’s
The Making of the English Working Class (1963), the other from Milton’s Latin poem ad Patrem (‘To his Father’).
To these quotations he adds ‘Heredity’, a short prefatory lyric of his own:
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How you became a poet’s a mystery!
Wherever did you get your talent from?
I say: I had two uncles, Joe and Harry —
one was a stammerer, the other dumb.
Harrison’s poetry gushes with the joy of release from impediments to speech. At times, his adjectives, his metaphors,
and his classical references seem to tumble over each other as prodigally as do Keats’s. At others, and notably in his
striking translations of the Oresteia and of plays by Molière and Racine, he writes with an expressive immediacy.
This is particularly true of his versions of the medieval religious plays published in 1985 as The Mysteries, versions
which are firmly rerooted in Harrison’s own gritty Yorkshire English and in the continuing culture of the North. His
urban poems, however, tend to look at cities from oblique angles. His Durham is culturally trisected as ‘University,
Cathedral, Gaol’; his York is contracted to a malodorous telephone kiosk; his Leeds is untidy, sooty, and war-scarred;
his Newcastle, so exotically celebrated in his ‘Newcastle is Peru’ (1970), is the city of the ‘sluggish Tyne meandering
through | the staithes and shipyards of Peru’ where ‘commerce and contraceptives glide | and circle on the turning
tide’. Harrison’s long quatrain poem v (1985) draws together many of the recurrent themes of his verse. As its
abbreviated title (v for versus) suggests, it is a poem of contentions. It moves from the Leeds graveyard where his
parents are buried, through an imagined dialogue with the inarticulate skinheads who have defaced the headstones
with obscene graffiti, to a brief pondering of local demographic changes, and, finally, to ‘Home, home to my woman,
where the fire’s lit’. As so often in his work, coal, coal dust, and coal fires represent the tangible fibres of workingclass
England, its pressed seams of meaning, its securities and its distinctive values.
The ‘New Morality’: The 1960s and 1970s
When Philip Larkin located the stirrings of a sexual revolution in the ‘annus mirabilis’ of 1963, he was not simply
hitting on a convenient rhyme for that other newish phenomenon, the ‘LP’. Larkin had long admired what was
probably the most influential novel of the British 1960s, the belatedly published Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and he later
expressed an appreciation of what he recognized as ‘the first advance in popular music since the War’, the songs of
the Beatles. The unequivocal ‘Not Guilty’ verdict at the conclusion of the trial of Penguin Books in 1960 — after their
publication of a paperback version of Lawrence’s banned novel — seemed to Larkin, and to other contemporary
observers, to be a liberating sign of the times. So, in a different sense, was the release of the Beatles’ first album three
years later. The Lady Chatterley verdict represented a breaking of the shackles of official censorship and public
prudery; the Beatles’ record expressed the energy of a new popular music, one that had appropriated the vitality of
American styles and added a new lyricism and a home-grown romanticism. At the trial, Lady Chatterley’s Lover had
been defended against charges of obscenity by a succession of witnesses drawn from the literary, critical, and clerical