ABSTRACT
Tony Harrison has long been associated with the North, with Yorkshire, and particularly with Leeds where he grew up in a close-knit working-class family, near the two uncles he immortalized in the poem “Heredity.” In the 1970s, the Northern poet who was making his mark in the cultural Establishment and was beginning to be recognized for his formal virtuosity and mastery of prosody, was also keen on making his idiosyncratic language heard by people for whom, most often than not, Leeds, Sheffield, or even Yorkshire, all merged into some vague and stereotypical representations of the North. Although he is a scholar and an erudite, Harrison has had a great impact on a younger generation of Northerners who could identify with the sociolinguistic issues at stake in his poetry, and above all with his Northern voice. In this chapter, I wish to focus on the use of dialect in Harrison’s poetry as a source of linguistic and aesthetic authenticity. The use of restricted codes of language in Harrison’s highly formal sonnets draws attention to the sociolinguistic prejudices attached to dialect in an attempt to reclaim a lost catholicity between high and low culture.
