Dividing lines

The death of poet and playwright Tony Harrison has served as a reminder that culture wars are nothing new. This BBC article by Neil Armstrong from earlier this year tells the story of how Harrison's long-form poem V went from relative obscurity upon publication in 1985 to national notoriety when it was broadcast on Channel 4 in 1987, its creator cast as the bete noire of right-wing politicians and newspapers.

The extraordinary poem - available to read in full on the site of the London Review Of Books, which first published it - left an indelible mark on me when I first encountered it. Prompted by the desecration of graves in the cemetery where Harrison's parents were buried, V is a mirror up to the realities of Thatcher's Britain in the mid-1980s. As fellow Yorkshire poet Blake Morrison put it in his introduction to the poem in the Independent, "it describes unflinchingly what is meant by a divided society, because it takes the abstractions we have learned to live with - unemployment, racial tension, inequality, deprivation - and gives them a kind of physical existence on the page".

Typically, then, Tory politicians and press (and Mary Whitehouse too, of course) frothed and fulminated against its "bad language" - both an attempt to whip up a moral panic and a cynical distraction technique to deflect attention away from what Harrison was actually trying to say. There was also an evident disgust at Harrison's perceived (ab)use of the poetic form - and indeed the deliberate echoes of Thomas Gray's Elegy Written In A Country Churchyard - to make his point; this was supposedly the sacred transformed into the profane. Yet, as underlined by the supplementary evidence reproduced in the second Bloodaxe edition, V struck a chord at least as widely as it struck a nerve.

Not only did the episode expose a whole swathe of reactionary philistines, it also underlined that poetry was not dusty and moribund; on the contrary, it could still be a living, breathing artform with the capacity to genuinely connect with people on an emotional and intellectual level and to offer insightful commentary on contemporary society. Not bad, as legacies go.