Comments on: I’m with Wendy Cope when she says…

By: Alicia (AE)

Alicia (AE) — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 13:35:23 +0000

One certainly gets a taste of this personality in the letters printed in his brother’s book, “My Brother, A.E. Housman”, or whatever it is called… including some terrific “critiques” of his brother’s poems, which are sharp and funny without ever being cruel. If I were at home, I’d take the book down and post some. Maybe when I get back to Athens in a week.
Again I say… won’t someone ask me to review this and send me a review copy? Any takers? Poetry Foundation?

By: Don Share

Don Share — Sun, 21 Oct 2007 18:15:17 +0000

I hate to see this thread fade away, so here are some teasers form AEH’s letters, taken from Paul Johnson’s review for the Literary Review:
“He could be sharp. He refused to be included in an anthology with Meredith ‘as I am a respectable character and do not care to be seen in the company of galvanised corpses. By this time [1903] he stinketh for he has been dead twenty years.’ He wrote: ‘I do not want to write letters to a woman whose name is Birdie.’ He wrote: ‘Mr Thomas thanks me for “a poem”, and prints two: which is the one he doesn’t thank me for?’ Here is a letter received by another anthologist called Moore of Burton-upon-Trent:
Permission to quote is one thing, permission to misquote is another. First you take certain verses of mine and disfigure them with illiterate alterations, then you ask me to let you attribute them publicly to me, and now, because I do not abet you in injuring my reputation, you think it rather hard. Why was Burton built on Trent?
But though he often refused permission to quote, he also declined fees and royalties. He wrote:
Vanity, not avarice, is my ruling passion; and so long as young men write to me from America saying that they would rather part with their hair than with their copy of my book, I do not feel the need of food and drink.”

By: Don Share

Don Share — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 16:48:33 +0000

Here's a link to the "Fragment of a Greek Tragedy" for those who want to put on a performance of it!

By: Steve

Steve — Sat, 06 Oct 2007 17:24:19 +0000

But really the closest contemporary heir of Housman is… Robert Creeley!
(I am actually serious about this claim, but will be explaining it, with any luck, at greater length in another venue a couple of months from now.)

By: ALicia (AE)

ALicia (AE) — Sat, 06 Oct 2007 05:39:46 +0000

I–maybe I should say WE because it is a favorite of my husband’s, who has about memorized it–ADORE Fragment of a Greek Tragedy. It is in the most perfect classical Translationeze. (Ange, you would appreciate it from you Greek classes.) Really, it has to be performed to be appreciated. Housman had a real flare for light verse and parody (”The shades of night were falling fast/ And the rain was falling faster,/ When through an Alpine village passed/ An Alpine village pastor”)…
To me, Housman seems less “dated” now than many modernist experiments (I say this as a fan of Eliot), less a product of a specific time, that is, which makes sense because he was striving for a timelessness. It is kind of bizarre to think that The Waste Land and Last Poems both came out in 1922.
The accusations of “false pastoral” that dogged him from the appearance of Shropshire Lad have always seemed to me misplaced. All pastoral is “false”–it is the most pointedly artificial of the genres.

By: Don Share

Don Share — Sat, 06 Oct 2007 03:33:20 +0000

Re Ewart – ah, but notice I said to proceed to him from Wendy Cope, post-Housman – not to go directly from him.
Actually, I think you can probably stop dead in your tracks when you reach the end of Housman…

By: Don Share

Don Share — Sat, 06 Oct 2007 03:17:24 +0000

Steve, I think you’re exactly right about the detour to Landor, whose poems, by the way, ought to be more easily available (if you have a thousand bucks, you can get them all on CD-ROM). As for his prose, I tried to engage in some of his many “Imaginary Conversations,” but they have faded from my own imagination, unlike the best of his poems.

By: Steve

Steve — Sat, 06 Oct 2007 00:04:35 +0000

Alicia, you now have to tell us what you think of “Fragment of a Greek Tragedy.”
Don, I can’t second the recommendation that lovers of Housman proceed directly to Ewart– perhaps a detour at Landor? (Has anyone here spent time with Landor’s prose works? I’ve always wanted to, but I just haven’t.)
There are two Wendy Copes, the literary-historical parodist and the author of well-made light or comic verse about courtship from an urbane Englishwoman’s perspective. Lovers of the former should probably read Ewart; lovers of the latter should certainly check out Sophie Hannah.

By: Vivek Narayanan

Vivek Narayanan — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 19:41:57 +0000

Last week for some reason, in a kind of zeitgeist fashion, entirely unaware of his letters or his stock secretly on the rise, I was thinking fondly of how much I liked Housman and his land of lost content, and so looked him up, startled to find that Shropshire Lad appeared in 1896. Somehow I had mentally dated it at least 30 years later– the diction so fresh that many of his poems could easily have been written yesterday.

By: Alicia (AE)

Alicia (AE) — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 15:38:25 +0000

Yes, you’d think that for upwards of $300 they might throw in an ACTUAL letter by Housman…