The state of the nation: Tony Harrison’s v.

Abstract

This essay is concerned with the contested critical question of the political character of Tony Harrison’s v. (1984), a famous ‘state of the nation’ poem that generated hostile criticism from many quarters. Important ‘left’ readings of v. criticised it as a liberal evasion of the political. This essay contests these readings quite directly, and sees this work as in fact highly political. It presents a revisionist reading of v. in the polemical contexts of its composition and reception. It is also in v. that Harrison most directly voices his enduring identification with the nineteenth-century French poet Arthur Rimbaud (1854–91). Rimbaud’s importance for Harrison’s poetic and identity has gone unnoticed in the scholarship, but is examined in this essay. Detailed attention is also accorded to the aesthetic and political importance for v. of its literary model of difference, Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, which has not hitherto been fully understood. v. ends with the poet’s epitaph. This essay ends with a coda that reflects upon the epitaph of a steadfast poet who will be buried on Leeds ground.