Tony Harrison, the award-winning poet and dramatist "whose writings fueled national conversations about class, obscenity and politics," died September 26, the Guardian reported. He was 88. A major voice in British poetry since he published his first collection in 1964, Harrison "wrote front-page dispatches for the Guardian from the Bosnian war, and scandalized the nation with his 1985 poem 'V.' Written after football hooligans desecrated his parents' gravestones, the expletive-laden work was described as a 'torrent of filth' by the Daily Mail when it was broadcast on Channel 4, prompting an early-day motion in the Commons. It is now studied in schools."
His poetry explored the tension between his working-class background and the arts, as in the poem "Book Ends," where he wrote of being unable to talk to his father on the night of his mother's death: "Back in our silences and sullen looks,/ for all the Scotch we drink, what's still between's/ not the thirty or so years, but books, books, books."
Harrison's friendship with Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka contributed to his moving in 1962 to Nigeria, where he wrote the play Akin Mata, a version of Aristophanes' comedy Lysistrata with African music and dance. He also published his first poetry pamphlet, Earthworks, there in 1964. After he returned to Britain in 1967, his first poetry collection, The Loiners, won the 1970 Geoffrey Faber memorial prize.
Harrison's 1973 adaptation of Molière's The Misanthrope was his big break at the National Theatre, with adaptations of The Oresteia and The Mysteries following, along with original productions Phaedra Britannica, Bow Down, and The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus, which was based on fragments of a Sophocles play.
His career spanned theater, opera, film, television and print, but Harrison preferred to be regarded as a poet. In 1987, when Richard Eyre's film of "V" was broadcast, Harrison "became renowned as a public poet, and a fearlessly political one, making headlines again two years later for his film-poem The Blasphemers' Banquet, which was prompted by the fatwa placed on Salman Rushdie and led to the Archbishop of Canterbury asking the BBC to withdraw it," the Guardian wrote. His 1999 film-poem Prometheus reframed the myth as an example of class warfare.
In 1995, the Guardian sent him to Bosnia to cover the war, and a poem written while traveling in an armored vehicle outside Sarajevo made the newspaper's front page. "Why shouldn't poetry address what happened yesterday, and be published in the newspaper?" he told the Guardian in a 2007 interview. "Yes, I've got inwardness and tenderness, but I also get angry and vituperative, and you have to honor that as well."
When his name came up as a possible contender for the poet laureateship in 1999, he wrote "Laureate's Block," a poem that was published in the Guardian. Harrison wanted to remain "free to write what I think should be written/ free to scatter scorn in Number 10/ free to blast and bollock Blairite Britain."
Britain's current laureate, Simon Armitage, noted that Harrison blazed a trail, saying in 2000: "He has allowed my generation to do our own thing without having to worry too much about where we come from and what accents we've got. Trying to write in a way that's representative of our voices was a pitched battle for him."
Harrison once said he hoped "the people who knew me will talk about me over a bottle of wine after I've gone.... But what I'm proud of is that I can read poems about my parents in Leeds or Bradford, and men especially are suddenly sobbing in the audience. That a short poem has touched them that deeply and brings that kind of response is better than a rave review."