Tony Harrison: Art and Extinction

Length / Form Series of eight poems included in ‘The School of Eloquence’ series. Poems 2 and 7 are sixteen-line sonnets.

Allusion to Classical figure Caractacus

Allusion to Classical place Rome

Relationship to Classical text In Section 2. ‘Loving Memory’: 'where Caractacus fought Rome', incidental to meditation on place and memory. In Section 7 ‘The Poetry Lesson’: The butterfly’s ‘ambrosia’s salt dew / and nectars sucked from cayman’s        lacrimae’ (but Harrison goes on to recall seeing a blue fritillary feed on human dung).