Fire, fennel and the future of socialism: Tony Harrison’s Prometheus

This chapter is about the electric presence of ancient Greek and Roman culture in the film poetry of Tony Harrison. It examines the use of the classical broadly in his film poetry, including The Big H, Loving Memory, and A Maybe Day in Kazakhstan, but will discuss Harrison’s classicism in closer detail by focusing on three poems made between 1992 and 2000 which each overtly centre around classical texts, figures, and concepts: The Gaze of the Gorgon, Prometheus, and Metamorpheus. It includes unpublished archival findings, drawn from the poet’s notebooks, and will examine the many mediating texts between ancient source and new poem, and interjecting transhistorical parallels which are fiercely pulled into the creative and hermeneutic processes by the poet. The chapter argues that the coupling of Harrison’s intensive research of, and creative close reading into, his classical sources, with a determined and wilful presentism, brings about a uniquely caustic mythopoeic virtuosity rarely encountered outside of the works of the classical authors themselves. It is not concerned with bringing the ancient back to life, re-enactment, or anything like that: Harrison’s classicism is concerned with using the uniquely flexible diachronic narrative framework provided by looking back to an imagined and highly symbolic mythical past, through exemplary performance texts in which the spoken word is primary, in order to face up to contemporary reality, and then crucially asking ‘What next?’ It is quite as much a recipe for the extension of hope as it is for dissent.