Tony Harrison Quotes

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Tony Harrison

Profession : Poet

Birth : April 30, 1937

I believe more in the power of drama than in the power of religion.

Tony Harrison

'Night Mail' belongs quintessentially to the age of steam. It is impossible to simply go with the idea of remaking it.

Tony Harrison

The Greek tragic mask is one of my main metaphors for the role of the poet. The eyes of the tragic mask are always open to witness even the worst, and the mouth is always open to make poetry from it. Neither ever close.

Tony Harrison

You can make poems out of anger as well as tenderness. You can make poetry out of anything. It can be the ugliest of emotions. It doesn't have to be sweetness and light.

Tony Harrison

I spent a lot of time on recce. It is a kind of creative chaos, but I like the sense of creative serendipity.

Tony Harrison

I hate everything about writing except doing it.

Tony Harrison

I've realised darkness and light are inter-dependent, just as death is an enhancer of life.

Tony Harrison

Poetry is all I write, whether for books or readings or for the National Theatre or for the opera house and concert hall or even for TV.

Tony Harrison

I've always had the wish, the need, and the obsession to become a public poet.

Tony Harrison

I've written on public matters, but I don't understand how anyone could tout me as a possible poet laureate when I wrote a poem on the abdication of King Charles III or about the sex life of the Royals... anybody who knew my work would know I'm not a contender.

Tony Harrison

I think that, as you get older, you want to be freer rather than more bound.

Tony Harrison

I think it's the tendency to want to create gods and monotheistic absolutes and absolute certainties that is the continual temptation in human thought - that's the great danger. Every time we create a god, we diminish humanity.

Tony Harrison

One of the important things about familiar form and metricality is that it draws attention to the physical nature of language: the spell-binding nature of it and the ceremony of articulation.

Tony Harrison

A poem, once it's written, is meant to be read with the inner voice of the person who reads it.

Tony Harrison

A lot of my activity in the theatre, and even in writing poems, was a kind of retrospective aggro on the English teacher who wouldn't allow me to read poetry aloud.

Tony Harrison

I need to look back on my poetic ventures, make sense of them as a whole, and move forward... and to experiment without external demands.

Tony Harrison

Honours seem to be the nature of British life. It's horrible. Maybe I'm mad, but the older I get, the less I want to have honours loaded on me.

Tony Harrison

I really admire the great Japanese artists who could change their name three times in a lifetime. You could get rid of one and renew yourself.

Tony Harrison

You get early inoculation against the idea of success if you're a poet. When I published my first collection of sonnets, I sold about five copies; now kids study them for A level. Wanting to be successful in that other world of money or fame is not interesting. Poetry isn't like that, and it never has been.

Tony Harrison

I wanted to learn Latin and Greek and become a poet and acquire power over language. I only understand this clearly in retrospect, that my ability to study came from a hunger to learn all the resources of articulation.

Tony Harrison