ABSTRACT
Reading's differences from Tony Harrison, however, are even more significant, and help to define his remarkable individuality. Harrison, we have seen, is a humanistic writer whose work draws much of its strength from the close identification between the poet as poet and the biographical individual who grew up in working-class Leeds, went to Leeds Grammar School and so on. Representations of the poet in Reading's work are extravagantly fictive. In his early poem 'Fiction' a fictitious character called Donald creates a character called 'Donald' or 'Don' who writes poetry under the pseudonym 'Peter Reading' and sues a man whose real name is 'Peter Reading' for having once written a fiction about a poet who wrote verse concerning a novelist called Donald Nicholson-Smith whose book Fiction deals with 'Don'. One of Reading's favourite metres, both here and elsewhere, especially in Ukulele Music, is an imitation classical elegiac distich, hexameter and pentameter.
