From Baghdad to Sarajevo to Beeston: The War Poetry of Tony Harrison

Abstract

Much has been written about Tony Harrison’s representation of the social and political class “wars” that have shaped British society. However, this critical depiction ignores his occupation of other war zones. In his role as a correspondent for The Guardian and The Observer during the Gulf and Bosnian Wars for instance, Harrison produced poems that directly responded to international events, even travelling to sites of conflict to produce poetic dispatches from the front line. A new reading of these poems, combined with a consideration of the poet’s archived notebooks, prompts a critical re-examination of the poet’s position as an international war writer. By examining Harrison’s poetry and archived documentation a new image of the poet emerges—one that confirms his place as a war poet for the twentieth century and which sheds new light on the moral, formal and aesthetic considerations that characterise his front-line poetics.