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" The first thing you see in my hallway is a large 18th-century bust of Milton, who stares at me as I watch TV and reminds me of the grave and committed role of the poet. Although he was blind, Milton had one of the most unswerving gazes of all English poets. "

Tony Harrison

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

Tony Harrison

Park

Everest

" I wanted to learn Latin and Greek and become a poet and acquire power over language. I only understand this clearly in retrospect, that my ability to study came from a hunger to learn all the resources of articulation. "

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

" You litter poems with too much learning when you're younger. "

" 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 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. "

" 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

" 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

" You can make poems out of anger as well as tenderness. You can make poetry out of anything. It can be the ugliest of emotions. It doesn't have to be sweetness and light. "

" I have always loved radio as a medium. "

" Why shouldn't poetry address what happened yesterday and be published in the newspaper? "

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

Tony Harrison

Audience

Actor

" I hate being called poet/dramatist/translator/director. 'Poet' covers it all for me. "

Tony Harrison

Covers

Hate

" 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. "

" 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. "

" The imagination has its limits, and you have to face up to that. "

Tony Harrison

Face

You

" I am capable of bad taste - deliberately. "

Tony Harrison

Bad

Bad Taste

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

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

Tony Harrison

Hoping

Decade

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

" I've written on public matters, but I don't understand how anyone could tout me as a possible poet laureate when I wrote a poem on the abdication of King Charles III or about the sex life of the Royals... anybody who knew my work would know I'm not a contender. "

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

" I think it's the tendency to want to create gods and monotheistic absolutes and absolute certainties that is the continual temptation in human thought - that's the great danger. Every time we create a god, we diminish humanity. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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'm not the sort of person who reads much about himself. "

" 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. "