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" Coming from a very inarticulate family made me try to speak for those who can't express themselves and created a need for articulation at its most ceremonial - poetry. "

Tony Harrison

Speak

Try

Poetry

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" I have always loved radio as a medium. "

" Of course you have to provide for the vulnerable and the children, but also, the vulnerable and the children need art in some form or another. You need spiritual experiences that, I think, forms of art give best. "

" I really admire the great Japanese artists who could change their name three times in a lifetime. You could get rid of one and renew yourself. "

" I'd rather climb Everest than go for a walk in the park. "

Tony Harrison

Park

Everest

" I believe more in the power of drama than in the power of religion. "

" Statues are one of the ways I try to test the traditions of European culture against the most modern destructive forces. I often make a point of seeking them out and have used them as mouthpieces in my film poetry, as with Heinrich Heine in 'The Gaze of the Gorgon.' "

" I like a direct relationship between actor and audience. "

Tony Harrison

Audience

Actor

" I've always had the wish, the need, and the obsession to become a public poet. "

" Poetry is all I write, whether for books or readings or for the National Theatre or for the opera house and concert hall or even for TV. "

" It's been an obsession with me from childhood, the horrors of the twentieth century. "

" Honours seem to be the nature of British life. It's horrible. Maybe I'm mad, but the older I get, the less I want to have honours loaded on me. "

" I need to look back on my poetic ventures, make sense of them as a whole, and move forward... and to experiment without external demands. "

" The Greek tragic mask is one of my main metaphors for the role of the poet. The eyes of the tragic mask are always open to witness even the worst, and the mouth is always open to make poetry from it. Neither ever close. "

" Yes, I've got inwardness and tenderness, but I also get angry and vituperative, and you have to honour that as well. "

" You get early inoculation against the idea of success if you're a poet. When I published my first collection of sonnets, I sold about five copies; now kids study them for A level. Wanting to be successful in that other world of money or fame is not interesting. Poetry isn't like that, and it never has been. "

" One of the important things about familiar form and metricality is that it draws attention to the physical nature of language: the spell-binding nature of it and the ceremony of articulation. "

" I am capable of bad taste - deliberately. "

Tony Harrison

Bad

Bad Taste

" Looking back, fire images have been constant in my poetry. As a boy, it was my job to light the fire each morning, and I remember the celebratory bonfires at the end of the war. It was from staring into fire that I began my first poetry. "

" I often find myself quoting from Victor Hugo after one of my theatrical ventures. 'Now that my play is a failure,' he once said, 'I find I love it all the more.' I first quoted that after 'Square Rounds' at the Olivier in 1992. "

" I think poems belong as much in the news pages as the literary pages. A lot of people throw aside the literary pages! Whereas everybody looks at the news section. "

" I spent a lot of time on recce. It is a kind of creative chaos, but I like the sense of creative serendipity. "

" Theatre has to be theatrical. It has to draw attention to itself, like poetry. "

" For me, there is a paradox in poetry, which is like the paradox in tragedy. You have the most terrible subject, but it's in a form that is so sensually gratifying that it connects the surviving heart to the despairing intellect. "

Tony Harrison

Poetry

Heart

" I was well read and knew languages, but I didn't want to become Ezra Pound. I wanted to write poetry that people like my parents might respond to. "

" A lot of my activity in the theatre, and even in writing poems, was a kind of retrospective aggro on the English teacher who wouldn't allow me to read poetry aloud. "

Tony Harrison

Poetry

Writing

" I've realised darkness and light are inter-dependent, just as death is an enhancer of life. "

" I hate the anglicanisation of culture, the idea that culture is genteel. It's not genteel. "

" The ear will surrender even at those times when the eye wants to close, when the eye doesn't want to watch. "

" I'm hoping to have a ninth decade like Matisse's. "

Tony Harrison

Hoping

Decade

" I love being on the road with others, with a camera, but also being alone writing poetry. "