All the Vs of Life: Conflicts and Controversies in Tony Harrison’s Poetry

We then decided to focus our book on ‘all the versuses of life’ to which Harrison refers in his longest, and most controversial poem V, both his own and those of the class-divided Britain of the Eighties. We took the quote from V, but we believe that all of Harrison’s poetry is based upon a juxtaposition of various social, political and cultural issues, which most often remain in conflict and stir controversy, much as the setting of Holbeck cemetery may seem controversial and disclose conflict. We also believe that the issues undertaken in Harrison’s poetry directly refer to a number of problems afflicting Britain and its inhabitants, which are in fact universal from both a spatial and temporal aspect, thus being of great value to readers in other countries, both at present, and in subsequent years. The result is the present book, in which we attempt to explore the divisive conflict as a constant characteristic of Harrison’s poetry, and explore the social, cultural and political nature of ‘verse’ and versus making.