Classics and Identity in Poetry of the North East

Poetry fusing the North East and classical material came into its own in the songs of Rudyard Kipling, embedded within the Romano-British chapters in Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906). The ideologically divergent explorations of British identity and Hadrian’s Wall by Wilfrid Gibson, W.H. Auden and the Horatian Modernist Basil Bunting followed. He in turn was a key figure in the transformation of Newcastle by Tom Pickard into a cultural magnet attracting poets from the mid-1960s. They were attracted by the material remains of the Romano-British world, the way the classical past could refine North East-based identities grounded in religion or sexuality and found the ancient world and the fall of the Roman Empire useful in exploring the plight of the North East’s working classes, while others like Sean O’Brien, Alistair Elliot and Tony Harrison turned to ancient Greece and its drama. Their international perspectives widened the identities produced at the cusp between Classics and the North East and turned it into a psychological focus for a radical, global humanism. The chapter ends with a discussion of Writing on the Wall (2001–6), a creative writing initiative bringing poets to the region from the countries that had supplied soldiers for the Roman army in the north of England. The classical past of England’s North East definitively came ‘home’ in the forging of identities by both women and the inhabitants of the world far beyond Britain’s borders.