... significant theme of division. The poem focuses on the poet's experience in an education where he was, to an extent, a misfit, and a deviant who was rising above his limiting social background. The poem is dedicated to Professors Richard Hoggart and Leon Cortez, two figures who Harrison can easily familiarise with, Leeds-born Richard Hoggart was an analyst of working-class culture and Leon Cortez entertained with his blue-collar contortions of the bourgeois culture. The poem addresses the way in which Harrison's own accent had to be oppressed while he was at grammar school and he was forced to speak in Received Pronunciation (RP). The young Harrison suffered at school, wherein he was exacted with the fact that only RP was suitable for reading Keats aloud and the only part for which his accent would suffice was the "Drunken Porter in Macbeth."1 Harrison sets up linguistic oppositions within the frame of ...

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