Tony Harrison and the Holocaust

Rowland (English, U. of Salford, UK) counters Adorno's well- known comment that "to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric" with his critique of a contemporary British poet's struggle to accentuate the positive in a world which, in Harrison's words, "has had its affirmative spirit burnt out." Though not typically regarded among post-Holocaust literature, poems such as "The Pocket Wars of Peanuts Joe" and "Sonnets for 1945" interpret the Holocaust and Hiroshima in a non-victim approach through …