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Essay on The poem V written by Tony Harrison
Tony Harrison is an English poet. He was born in a city on the River Aire in West Yorkshire in northern England; a center of the clothe industry Leeds and educated at Leeds Grammar School and Leeds University. The matter of much of his poems is provided by the memoirs of his working-class upbringing. His poems and translations show an influential authority of assonance and a professional alteration of everyday language. Tony Harrison's writing is characterized by an emotional rendezvous with contradictions generated by his childhood, teaching and household relations.
Although a self-consciously radical and proletarian writer whose political sympathies lie resolutely with the class and community of his birth, he chose not to snub predictable verse forms but as an alternative embraced the rhyme and worked right through his career within the prevailing measures of English prosody, though with a phonetic resourcefulness in the prologue of regional and dialect forms which move aligned with the grain of Received articulation and usual English. Oppositional imperatives thus notify mutually his visual and his subject matter, and the rhyme form in particular has been used to state his popular sympathies and the conversational and demotic language of his Yorkshire education. (The Hutchinson, 1998)
His best-known poem is the fairly extended V, written during the miners' strike of 1984-85, and relating an expedition to see his parents' grave in a Leeds graveyard "now beleaguered with beer cans and vandalized by obscene graffiti". The title “V” alludes concurrently to Churchill's two-fingered “V for victory” sign and the two-fingered ordinary insult, but moreover punningly draws jointly “versus” and “verses”, consequently drawing concentration to the biased divisions that work through a poem concerned with brutality, complaint, offence and revolt, and moreover the loss of that care for society which at least joined Gray's sentiments to the compassionate respects of the older working-class................
