Tony Harrison
Remembered

Sir Richard Eyre reflects on his long friendship with the late poet, translator and playwright

Photo: Colin McPherson/Alamy

Tony used to say “the beat is in the blood”, in the iambic thumping of the heart, the rhythm of breathing, of walking – the pulse of life. It is hard to imagine that his beat has been stilled.

He wrote almost invariably in the iambic metre and all his writing is rhythmic, rhymed, memorable, alliterative, dramatic, and impenitently English.

Its voice is musical, sensual, working-class, and Yorkshire – a voice with a sense of place and class, a heartland from which the speaker has been separated.

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