Tony Harrison

From Permanently Bard
Edited by Carol Rutter
1995 
Bloodaxe Books, UK

p. 33

Heredity

How you became a poet's a mystery!
Wherever did you get your talent from?
I say: I had two uncles, Joe and Harry - 
one was a stammerer, the other dumb.

from Notes
p. 124

The poet Stephen Spender ... remarks that this little epigraph explains 'the accident of a poet's having been born into [a] working class family' by offering 'an ironic theory of psychological compensation.' Spender says he is tempted to regard Harrison almost as 'a changeling, not out of some other social class but perhaps out of Shakespearean romance, sneaked into a cradle in some house in a back street in Leeds by some royal parent (poetry being royal) anxious to disembarrass herself or himself of an unwanted offspring.'  ... his remarks are endearing, but they are also ironically revealling. By assuming that the poet rocked in a working-class cradle must be a changeling Spender nurses the notion that Harrison's poetry strangles the utterance, that 'Poetry's the speech of kings.' Uncle Joe and Uncle Harry ...keep returning ...  the stutterer and the mute are the influences who preside over Harrison's effort to turn 'mute ingloriousness' into poetry.


http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2012/jul/18/rediscovering-tony-harrison