Born in 1937 and he is still alive!
- A very important thing to remember about Harrison is that he comes from a working class background. His father was a baker, and his parents never received a formal education. This background travels alongside Harrison, constantly entering inside his verse.
- He spoke with a regional Yorkshire dialect, and was told not to read poetry out loud in his class when he was younger! The idea of language as a means of communication is extremely important to him, especially when that language is formed by class divisions (i.e. the educated speak one language and the uneducated speak another). The inability, or unwillingness, of the ‘educated’ class to engage in an act of communication with the working class is something that he himself struggles with and attempts to portray in his poetry. He, as many critics have said, “gives voice to the voiceless.” How do we see this in the poems we have read?
- He combines standard English with an accented/dialect(ed) English, a combination which seeks to show that the lines of communication are possible if we will them. In the poem “Book Ends,” for example, he attempts to show the limitation of language by displaying his own relationship with his father, especially after his mother’s death. The father and son are unable to speak to one another because each speaks a different kind of English, one simple, the other complex. “Long Distance” is another poem that address these issues. How do these poems attempt to cross over the barriers of language? In “Long Distance,” what do references to the “JFK airport” and “New World treats” strive to show? How do we read the last lines of this poem?
- “Marked with a D,” as we are told in the footnote, mimics the “pat-a-cake” nursery rhyme. What does “D” stand for here? We have seen many nursery rhyme references or allusions throughout this class, an interesting way to tie many of the poets together (from Eliot on)— why does the nursery rhyme lend itself so easily to poetic creation? The poem speaks of his father’s death and cremation, but how is that cremation alluded to in the poem? The narrator claims that the father is released “from mortal speech”- what does that mean?
Leave a comment