Tony Harrison's Selected Poems, in its ordering of poems into thematic groups irrespective of the precise order of their publication, and in the erasure of the titles of particular volumes, seems to offer itself as a version of the poet's complete lyrical oeuvre, rather than as an interim ‘selection’ that refers to a larger and more proper corpus. Further, in its undisguised autobiographical aspect (the book's heart is the ever-expanding ‘from The School of Eloquence’, documents of a life still being lived, though the book already concludes with the poet's own epitaph) Selected Poems invites one to approach it in terms appropriate to the title of this series ‘Writers and their Work’ as something of a Bildungsroman. If, in this context, we can take a narrative from the book as a whole, we might describe a prominent aspect of that narrative as a growing into, or laying claim to, a sexual maturity. In this story that maturity is heterosexual and monogamous (more on those terms later), but it is also a story of moving away from home, of making a home of one's own, of measuring the ways one returns to the places that have formed one, and taking the measure of the changing self that makes those returns. With regard to these latter aspects, which I shall again expand upon in due course, the issue of maturity is staged by Harrison as a political issue. In short, the politics one stages as one's own are inextricably involved with one's ability to claim the maturity to articulate and live those politics’ implications. In short again – although this time the statement is sufficient to sum up the case in toto – in the earliest poems, first collected in The Loiners (1970, that mucky book that Harrison's mother would apparently have thrown upon the fire if it was not a library copy), political perspicacity and the sentimental education of sex are, to all intents and purposes, synonymous.

Basically, these early poems scratch at a sexual itch. They are largely dramatic poems, with named protagonists, but the poet's own persona seems to insinuate itself all the same into the protagonists’ imaginative and lexical limitations.