Word: housman
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Fifty years ago, A. E. Housman published, at his own expense, the first edition of A Shropshire Lad. The latest edition, which does homage to that event, is published by the Colby Library in Waterville, Me. Readers who cannot get one of the 500 copies of this Jubilee Edition* will miss: 1) a rare reminder that book designing is an art, not a packaging job; 2) a rare photograph of the poet at about the time he was writing his first volume; 3) a set of notes which should interest any admirer of Housman's poetry...
...finest lyric poets, but also one of the three or four great classical scholars of our time. His scholarly notes, reviews, letters and conversation contained a deftness of wit which Pope could hardly equal, and blasts of virulence which Swift could hardly surpass. But the anniversary chiefly celebrates Housman's poetry. Why has it been so much loved, by so many; and how, after 50 years, does it stand...
Rustic Herbivore. Editor Housman is apologetic about filling it. Most people, when they think of Wordsworth at all, think of him as a rustic herbivore who wrote, among reams of rhymed prose, some 100 sonnets glorifying the Church of England. By some literary freak he also managed to write the Ode on Intimations of Immortality. Then he earned Robert Browning's versified contempt ("Just for a handful of silver he left us") by changing his politics, later becoming poet laureate of England...
...says Editor Housman, Wordsworth is the great poet "it is most easy to laugh at, and sometimes the most difficult not to find dull." He was conservative, parochial, smug. "I could have written like Shakespeare," Wordsworth is reported to have said to Charles Lamb, "had I had a mind." "Yes," stammered Lamb, "it was the m-m-mind that was 1-1-lacking...
Pure Fountain. It has been said that "when Wordsworth's inferior work has been pruned away, only a half dozen first-rate poems remain. Arnold in his selection found 312 pages of first-rate poetry; Housman finds only 129 pages. Included in his selections are the Ode on Intimations of Immortality, Tintern Abbey, Michael, the best episode from The Prelude, a few narrative poems and a swatch of lyrics, 14 of Wordsworth's grand total of nearly 150 sonnets (some of which Housman considers greater than Milton's). All the Lucy poems are included. From...