In February 2020, the Labour MP Richard Burgon won cross-party support from 29 MPs – 27 Labour, 1 DUP and 1 SNP – for a House of Commons early day motion in praise of Tony Harrison, as a poet who had “always written, and spoken, for the people”. The citation praised work “fit to be ranked alongside Aeschylus and Shelley”, while pointing out that the same parliamentary machinery had been used, in 1987, in a failed attempt to ban a TV screening of Harrison’s long poem V on the grounds of obscenity.
One of the most political poets of the last century, Harrison, who has died aged 88, was also one of the most versatile. But he always insisted that all his work was “part of the same quest for a public poetry”.
