Word: housman
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...easy readers. Critic Blackmur's key word is responsibility-the responsibility of a writer to be no less than excellent in both matter and manner. Always tortuously, often brilliantly, he applies his implacable test to great and near-great men: Hardy, Yeats, T. E. Lawrence, Melville, Henry Adams, Housman, Thomas Wolfe, others...
Such poets as Sandburg, Masters, Riding are brutally panned; kindlier treated are Wallace Stevens, Conrad Aiken, Euripides and his translators Dudley Fitts and Robert Fitzgerald. Housman was no great minor poet; he was a man obsessed by an adolescent sense of death, with a knack for popular expression of it. Yeats used magic as Dante used Catholicism, as the spine or frame that great poetry needs. But T. E. Lawrence exemplifies the desperation, the brilliance, the failure, of the man of genius who can find no frame...