Word: housman
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1930-1939
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...NAME AND NATURE OF POETRY- A. E. Housman - Macmillan...
...cannot tell; but it is no featherbed for the repose of sluggards." More than one student of Latin verse, reading the preface to the best edition of Manilius, must have been surprised to find this sentence. Few professors of classics are capable of such utterance, but Alfred Edward Housman is no ordinary professor. British to the bone, classical to the core, in the never-numerous line of English scholar-poets he is the latest and perhaps the last. Thousands of readers know his two thin but unfragile volumes of poetry (A Shropshire Lad, Last Poems), and even Oxford dons have...
Professor Housman is unusual among poets: he does not consider himself one. With the publication of Last Poems (1922) he announced: "It is not likely that I shall ever be impelled to write much more. I can no longer expect to be revisited by the continuous excitement under which ... I wrote . . . nor indeed could I well sustain it if it came." He has had two rides on Pegasus; he wants no more. This abrupt reverence would be a rare phenomenon in any day. Anything Poet Housman had to say would carry authority to a multitude of readers. Few years...
...highest poetry, Housman thinks, is not definable. No modern over-estimator of the 18th Century, he says: "When I hear anyone say, with defiant emphasis, that Pope was a poet, I suspect him of calling in ambiguity of language to promote confusion of thought." Most poetical of all poets, he thinks, was William Blake. As an example of "perfect poetry" he quotes a stanza from Samuel Daniel...
...spend the night in sleep. Though Housman considers poetry "more physical than intellectual," "the majority of mankind notoriously and indisputably do not . . . possess the organ by which poetry is perceived." But he himself, while shaving in the morning, has to watch his thoughts because, "if a line of poetry strays into my memory, my skin bristles so that the razor ceases...