Best quotes by Tony Harrison on Poetry

Checkout quotes by Tony Harrison on Poetry

• ‟ Coming from a very inarticulate family made me try to speak for those who can't express themselves and created a need for articulation at its most ceremonial - poetry.

  - Tony Harrison
  

• ‟ Looking back, fire images have been constant in my poetry. As a boy, it was my job to light the fire each morning, and I remember the celebratory bonfires at the end of the war. It was from staring into fire that I began my first poetry.

  - 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
  

• ‟ 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
  

• ‟ 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
  

• ‟ For me, there is a paradox in poetry, which is like the paradox in tragedy. You have the most terrible subject, but it's in a form that is so sensually gratifying that it connects the surviving heart to the despairing intellect.

  - Tony Harrison
  

• ‟ I love being on the road with others, with a camera, but also being alone writing poetry.

  - Tony Harrison
  

• ‟ I was well read and knew languages, but I didn't want to become Ezra Pound. I wanted to write poetry that people like my parents might respond to.

  - Tony Harrison
  

• ‟ Theatre has to be theatrical. It has to draw attention to itself, like poetry.

  - 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
  

• ‟ Why shouldn't poetry address what happened yesterday and be published in the newspaper?

  - 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
  

• ‟ Statues are one of the ways I try to test the traditions of European culture against the most modern destructive forces. I often make a point of seeking them out and have used them as mouthpieces in my film poetry, as with Heinrich Heine in 'The Gaze of the Gorgon.'

  - Tony Harrison