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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“I was brought up on music hall, and at the same time, I was studying Greek at the age of 12.”

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

“There's a kind of despair about whether art can really do anything, but you have to incorporate that despair into the way you work. I try to soak my work in my sense of futility and fury.”

“I hate being called poet/dramatist/translator/director. 'Poet' covers it all for me.”

“Of course you have to provide for the vulnerable and the children, but also, the vulnerable and the children need art in some form or another. You need spiritual experiences that, I think, forms of art give best.”

“The first thing you see in my hallway is a large 18th-century bust of Milton, who stares at me as I watch TV and reminds me of the grave and committed role of the poet. Although he was blind, Milton had one of the most unswerving gazes of all English poets.”

“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.”

“I am capable of bad taste - deliberately.”

“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.”

“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.”

“It is always better to write for the whole of society than for the poetry-reading public.”

“I like a direct relationship between actor and audience.”

“Yes, I've got inwardness and tenderness, but I also get angry and vituperative, and you have to honour that as well.”

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

“The ear will surrender even at those times when the eye wants to close, when the eye doesn't want to watch.”

“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.”

“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.”