Oh, God will save her, fear you not

[sovay]

I enjoyed this review of a new biography of A.E. Housman, but I got to the last paragraph and disagreed so violently that I spent my shower fuming about it:

But that sweetness, verging on sentimentality, is also Housman's limitation: the lads and lasses slumbering under the grass, never growing old or sick or worrying about how to find a job. Sadness in Housman is a one-size-fits-all emotion, not one rooted in particulars. It puddles up automatically. And reading "A Shropshire Lad" you can find yourself becoming narcotized against feelings that are deeper and more complicated. That may be the real secret of the book's enduring popularity, the way it substitutes for a feeling of genuine loss the almost pleasant pain of nostalgia.

The reviewer claims earlier that "one reason 'A Shropshire Lad' has been so successful is that readers find there what they want to find," so perhaps I am merely following this well-worn tack, but I don't see how you can read Housman and miss the irony, the wryness, the sometimes bitterness and often ambiguity that never prevents the pleasure of a line that turns perfectly on itself. Some of his best poems seem to take themselves apart as they go. Some of them are hair-raising. Some of them are really funny. (It is impossible for me to take "When I was one-and-twenty" as a serious lament. In the same vein, it wasn't until tonight in the shower that I finally noticed that "Is my team ploughing" owes a cynical debt to "The Twa Corbies.") That is much more complicated than a haze of romantic angst and the vague sweet pain of lost content, especially seeing how much of Housman's language is vividly, specifically physical for all its doomed youth and fleeting time, not dreamy at all. Shoulder the sky, my lad, and drink your ale. I am not sure why the reviewer knocks Housman's Shropshire for not being "particular," either. Of course it's not actual Shropshire, where the poet himself acknowledged he never even spent much time. It's Housman's Arcadia, et ego and all. I finished the review and found myself thinking of Catullus—again, I had to have my hair full of soap before I realized why. I don't understand why anyone looks for the undiluted Housman in A Shropshire Lad any more than the Lesbia poems should be assumed to contain the authentic Catullus. Pieces of both of them, sure. But my grandmother didn't need the identity of the addressee of "Shake hands, we shall never be friends, all's over" pinned down in order to copy out the poem and save it after a college relationship broke up badly. (I thought it was hers for years.) Who cares if its second person was Moses Jackson or fictional? It spoke to a real loss. I don't think there is anything anesthetizing in that. I doubt Housman would have wanted the particulars known, anyway. I have to figure out a way to stop fuming and start being asleep.

Comments

[ashlyme]

I've read little Houseman, but it looks to me as if the reviewer's mistaken his mood for schmaltz. There's a lot of missed nuance. (Would he call Hardy's poetry "Emo"?) Granted that rural nostalgia is a very English disease. Often a cloying one. But nostalgia has edges, too.

[sovay]

I've read little Houseman, but it looks to me as if the reviewer's mistaken his mood for schmaltz.

I can strongly recommend reading more Housman. I got myself to calm down last night by doing just that, occasionally out loud to spatch. The last verse of "The Oracles" is one of my favorite pieces of English poetry. I named a short story after the last verse of "Reveille" (and loved, years later, discovering how Housman had worked it out into its iconic form). "Oh, when I was in love with you" is practically Dorothy Parker.

(Would he call Hardy's poetry "Emo"?)

Heh. He refers to him as Housman's "near-contemporary, whose bleakness, both personal and poetic, at times outdoes even Housman's. (Hardy once wrote to Rider Haggard, after the death of Haggard's ten-year-old son, 'To be candid I think the death of a child is never really to be regretted, when one reflects on what he has escaped')," which mostly makes me think that Hardy should never, ever have sent condolence cards to anyone.

Granted that rural nostalgia is a very English disease. Often a cloying one. But nostalgia has edges, too.

(Especially if you're watching Sapphire & Steel.)

I'm wondering if this is a kind of Tolkien problem. The review itself mentions "the way Housman's singular vision seized hold of the English imagination, inspiring not just a literary following but a generation of composers," in which case we have another example of something personal and idiosyncratic becoming an artistic template for people who may or may not share any of the writer's motivating feelings so much as they appreciate their expression. Part of the reason I have trouble accepting Housman as a poster child for nostalgia is that his entire professional career was devoted to picking apart the received wisdom of classical literature, trying to excavate whatever was really Propertius or Manilius from the glitches and noise and generation loss introduced by time—nothing was valuable to him just because it was old. I am not saying that the New Yorker review goes so far in collapsing Housman into the national sentiment he inspired, but maybe seeing him through a scrim of imitators filtered out some of the complexities? I suddenly found myself thinking that it's not fair to judge Tolkien's deep-time conlang weirdness by the fallout of a bad D&D session.

[ethelmay]

By the way, I once had the honor of finding an A.E. Housman translation (done when he was 16) hitherto unnoticed by scholars: see http://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/private/spider-song/ "The winning translation was printed in the Monthly Packet for November 1875 under the heading “Spider Subjects”: “Of the forty-three translations of Goethe’s Fischer we give the palm to A. E. Housman, for feeling and spirit”."

[sovay]

By the way, I once had the honor of finding an A.E. Housman translation (done when he was 16) hitherto unnoticed by scholars

Nice!

[cmcmck]

'A Shropshire Lad' has me in tears at times even after all these years and someone needs to learn what's really going on in there!

It's had such an effect on my life that we now live in 'the land of lost content' in rural Shropshire.

'Dead or living, drunk or dry, soldier, I wish you well'......

[sovay]

'A Shropshire Lad' has me in tears at times even after all these years and someone needs to learn what's really going on in there!

It was not the best review. And means I can't tell about the biography, either.

It's had such an effect on my life that we now live in 'the land of lost content' in rural Shropshire.

I think that's wonderful.

[chomiji]

The reviewer makes the mistake of thinking that he himself is more sophisticated in his view of life than Housman was. IMO, he could do with a closer reading of Terence, This Is Stupid Stuff:

"...And malt does more than Milton can
To justify God's ways to man.
Ale, man, ale's the stuff to drink
For fellows whom it hurts to think...

"I tell the tale that I heard told.
Mithridates, he died old."

Myself, I believe that in much of A Shropshire Lad, Housman accomplished just what he set out to do.

[sovay]

IMO, he could do with a closer reading of Terence, This Is Stupid Stuff

Hah. Yes. That's a good point. If you sound like the critic in that poem, then at least make sure that's the direction you want to be criticizing in.

Myself, I believe that in much of A Shropshire Lad, Housman accomplished just what he set out to do.

It works for me.

[moon_custafer]

I was about to ask if this reviewer had read "Is My Team Ploughing?"

[sovay]

I was about to ask if this reviewer had read "Is My Team Ploughing?"

He doesn't mention it. He does acknowledge "the provocative suggestion—which could equally well be applied to other Housman poems, including the strange one that recommends plucking out your eye and cutting off your hand or foot if it offends you—that not every line need be taken at face value and the whole thing might be meant angrily or ironically," but then doesn't seem to remember it when he comes around to summing the collection up. [edit] Also I don't think that's very provocative; I think that's just part of reading.

[teenybuffalo]

"Is me Team a Ploughing," sung by Dave Webber and Anni Fentiman, in a setting by Dave Webber (I think).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTkqKDNqB8I

The best possible way to encounter that poem for the first time: as a song in harmony by performers who could have done "Twa Corbies"/"Three Ravens" just before or afterwards.

Yeah, I think the reviewer's full of crap there. Reminds me of the anthologist of a treasury of Victorian verse I have somewhere, who is only on board to have a sneer at how we're much more sophisticated than this, these days.

[sovay]

"Is me Team a Ploughing," sung by Dave Webber and Anni Fentiman, in a setting by Dave Webber (I think).

Thank you! It's not the setting I know, at any rate, which is George Butterworth's. I like the incorporation of Housman directly into the folk tradition, see also the music I was listening to: I have no idea what he would have thought of it.

The best possible way to encounter that poem for the first time: as a song in harmony by performers who could have done "Twa Corbies"/"Three Ravens" just before or afterwards.

Is that how you first heard it, or just how you would have liked to?

Reminds me of the anthologist of a treasury of Victorian verse I have somewhere, who is only on board to have a sneer at how we're much more sophisticated than this, these days.

That sounds like the most useless anthology of Victorian verse ever.

[choco_frosh]

I hope sleep happened!

[sovay]

I hope sleep happened!

It did, thank you! I had long, involved, confusing, but not nightmare dreams.

[larryhammer]

I don't see how you can read Housman and miss the irony, the wryness, the sometimes bitterness and often ambiguity that never prevents the pleasure of a line that turns perfectly on itself

This.

Well, I can see how -- there are large numbers of people who cannot hear irony unless it is flagged. But they of all people should NEVER, EVER become REVIEWERS.

---L.

[sovay]

This.

Thank you.

Well, I can see how -- there are large numbers of people who cannot hear irony unless it is flagged. But they of all people should NEVER, EVER become REVIEWERS.

I don't even disagree that there's sadness in Housman. I just disagree that it's the prevailing effect, or that it's slush.

[kore]

that sweetness, verging on sentimentality, is also Housman's limitation

HAAAAAAAAAAAAAH.

I am reminded of the time I read a critic writing in earnest about Hardy, the simple nature poet. Some people catch sight of a couple of green hills and think it's a pastoral and off they go.

We don’t have anything remotely like it in American lit.

//throws a copy of Spoon River Anthology at his head

Some of Emily Dickinson’s brief lyrics come closest—tonally

whaa

but she has never quite attained Housman’s popularity

//gives up

[sovay]

HAAAAAAAAAAAAAH.

I'm trying to picture Housman's reaction and I'm having trouble.

I am reminded of the time I read a critic writing in earnest about Hardy, the simple nature poet. Some people catch sight of a couple of green hills and think it's a pastoral and off they go.

*snerk*

I am not actually sure I knew that Hardy was a poet as well as a novelist until about a dozen years ago when nineweaving sent me Brass Monkey's "Dr Fauster's Tumblers/The Night of Trafalgar/Prince William" and I discovered the centerpiece was a setting of a piece of Hardy's The Dynasts (1908). Which I liked as written folk song, but I still don't think I felt particularly about him as a poet until I ran into "At Lulworth Cove a Century Back." After that, I paid attention to his poetry.

[kore]

NOT THE DYNASTS OH NO oh man, I was in a grad VicLit seminar that was like half Hardy, and we only had to read the (long, long) opening of the Dynasts and we just wilted. It was so awful.

I think the first time I ever read him for myself was in a poetry anthology, as an adolescent -- stuff like "The Ruined Maid," "Neutral Tones," "Channel Firing," "The Dead Man Walking," "Darkling Thrush," "The Voice" (which is pretty amazing and haunting). Oh yeah, and Dylan Thomas reading "Lizby Brown" and "A Broken Appointment." The St John's College music library had one of those Dylan Thomas Reads records from the sixties in open stacks, and I dubbed it when I was a freshman like I did half their holdings and nearly played it til the tape broke. If you have Spotify you can listen to a lot of it http://www.openculture.com/2016/05/8-glorious-hours-of-dylan-thomas-reading-poetry-his-own-others.html

In a different Vic-and-after Poetry seminar (if I hadn't stupidly tried to get an MFA I'd've gone for that field instead) we read Oscar Wilde, Housman, Thomas Hardy, Hopkins, Sassoon, early Graves, &c., and you could just see peoples' psyches crumple under the pressure of Hardy's despair. "Convergence of the Twain" made people look like they'd just staggered out of an Early Bergman film festival. The novels (Jude, Tess) are bad enough, but the concentrated feeling in the poetry just decks you like a fist.

[sovay]

NOT THE DYNASTS OH NO oh man, I was in a grad VicLit seminar that was like half Hardy, and we only had to read the (long, long) opening of the Dynasts and we just wilted. It was so awful.

I will take your word about the rest of it, but the section excerpted as "The Night at Trafalgar (Boatman's Song)" is a good invented folk song and I like both its language and its perspective on Trafalgar.

The St John's College music library had one of those Dylan Thomas Reads records from the sixties in open stacks, and I dubbed it when I was a freshman like I did half their holdings and nearly played it til the tape broke. If you have Spotify you can listen to a lot of it

I do not have Spotify, but I grew up on several records of Dylan Thomas, so should check my parents' house to see if any of them are the same.

we read Oscar Wilde, Housman, Thomas Hardy, Hopkins, Sassoon, early Graves, &c., and you could just see peoples' psyches crumple under the pressure of Hardy's despair.

I find him a significantly less upsetting poet than novelist! I read The Mayor of Casterbridge in high school because I had friends reading it for English class and that was one of those why do people even do this to themselves moments.

"Convergence of the Twain" made people look like they'd just staggered out of an Early Bergman film festival. The novels (Jude, Tess) are bad enough, but the concentrated feeling in the poetry just decks you like a fist.

Or maybe the issue here is just that I like Bergman?

[cmcmck]

With me it was 'afterwards' that brought me up sharp.

I'd been taught as an undergrad by J C Gibson who'd edited all the Penguin edition Hardy novels- he succeeded it putting me off Hardy the novelist for life and sent me in the direction of early English literature, but Hardy the poet? That's something different.

Dumb question

[eileenlufkin]

Is the man Keats?

Re: Dumb question

[sovay]

Is the man Keats?

Yes, though I don't think it's a dumb question.

Re: Dumb question

[eileenlufkin]

Thanks for the answer and for being kind. I've only read Keats poems that show up in anthologies; did he write about Lulworth cove?

Re: Dumb question

[sovay]

I've only read Keats poems that show up in anthologies; did he write about Lulworth cove?

It looks as though he visited it on his way to Rome at the end of his life. I had to look that up just now.

Cool! Re: Dumb question

[eileenlufkin]

Thanks for the google-fu and the link.

[kore]

Oh yeah, I think you'd like Lane as a chaser:

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2001/02/19/lost-horizon

Lane said in a kissup article to Tina Brown that his pitching that piece led her to ask "Is Housman hot?" IIRC Stoppard was on Broadway or something, so yes, Housman was hot. Then again I think Shropshire Lad's always been hot, or at least never out of print.

I loved Housman since I read my dad's edition of ASL early on but I think my very favourite poem of his is actually the Horace translation:

The snows are fled away, leaves on the shaws
And grasses in the mead renew their birth,
The river to the river-bed withdraws,
And altered is the fashion of the earth.

The Nymphs and Graces three put off their fear
And unapparelled in the woodland play.
The swift hour and the brief prime of the year
Say to the soul, Thou wast not born for aye.

Thaw follows frost; hard on the heel of spring
Treads summer sure to die, for hard on hers
Comes autumn with his apples scattering;
Then back to wintertide, when nothing stirs.

But oh, whate'er the sky-led seasons mar,
Moon upon moon rebuilds it with her beams;
Come we where Tullus and where Ancus are
And good Aeneas, we are dust and dreams.

Torquatus, if the gods in heaven shall add
The morrow to the day, what tongue has told?
Feast then thy heart, for what thy heart has had
The fingers of no heir will ever hold.

When thou descendest once the shades among,
The stern assize and equal judgment o'er,
Not thy long lineage nor thy golden tongue,
No, nor thy righteousness, shall friend thee more.

Night holds Hippolytus the pure of stain,
Diana steads him nothing, he must stay;
And Theseus leaves Pirithous in the chain
The love of comrades cannot take away.

[sovay]

Oh yeah, I think you'd like Lane as a chaser

Oh, thank God, that's much better.

"The Housman mythology, with its lads outnumbering lasses, its redcoated soldiers, and its short-lived flowers, may seem to be drifting back into the Tennysonian age, or further, but 'A Shropshire Lad' keeps snapping to attention with phrases like 'Put the pistol to your head,' as if to remind any antiquarian readers that they will shortly be arriving at the twentieth century. Even one of the most famous verses in the collection begins with the urgency of a potboiler: 'On Wenlock Edge the wood's in trouble.' We are supposed to be in deepest pastoral, but that sounds to me like someone running into a bar to report a nearby fight."

I like the idea of pairing him with Dickinson. Has anyone ever done it fictionally?

I loved Housman since I read my dad's edition of ASL early on but I think my very favourite poem of his is actually the Horace translation

I don't tend to like his translations as much as his originals—despite his glorious mockery of the weird artificial cod-archaic language to which so many classical translations fall prey, I think he would have done better to work in a closer register to his own poetry—but I agree with you that he knocks the last verse of that one out of the park. The last two lines could be his own, which tells you how much Horace meant to him.

[kore]

Isn't Lane good? Sometimes he's too clever-clever, but he's always sharp and funny. If you haven't read 'Nobody's Perfect' (named after the closing line of Some Like It Hot) I recommend it.

I like the idea of pairing him with Dickinson. Has anyone ever done it fictionally?

I don't think so but that's a great idea.

I agree with you that he knocks the last verse of that one out of the park. The last two lines could be his own, which tells you how much Horace meant to him.

I had a huge amount of trouble with how Stoppard just took the written poetry and put the spoken words in Housman's mouth ("You're half my life!" he says to Jackson -- er, no), but it's a dreamscape anyway blah blah, but I just felt he didn't quite get Housman -- Housman slips away once again, like a shade, like who is it, Odysseus' mother when he tries to emmbrace her. But there are two awesome scenes in it, where he goes through Latin grammar for a poetry class (Stoppard has him make a female student cry, which 1) probably DID NOT HAPPEN and 2) a FEMALE student wrote in with the famous anecdote about Diffugere so fuck you, Stoppard) and when he talks with his young self about his own translation of it. That was really pure magic.

I think with Housman some of the weird archaic-fake diction comes from a consciousness he's writing at the end of that kind of tradition -- Dorothy Parker sometimes falls into it, too, weirdly enough, in some of her early Serious Poems. I mean, in "Fairies and Fusiliers" Graves does jam up stuff like "I’d Love to be a Fairy’s Child," which sounds like a Christmas cracker, up against "A Dead Boche" and "Letter to S. S." for God's sake. These people were feeling the cultural ground upheave under their feet. -- Millay never does quite escape it, that kind of diction, but I still like her anyway. -- Well I shouldn't generalize like that, the Imagists weren't like that at all, and then you get Marianne Moore, but they were more outliers. D.H. Lawrence wrote poetry in his own voice from the start, although I think people don't like him much anymore, which is a shame, because I think that's when he did a lot of his best writing. -- Imagine him and Housman meeting up, now that would be weird. They might bond over Italy tho. Or the Etruscans.

[sovay]

Isn't Lane good? Sometimes he's too clever-clever, but he's always sharp and funny.

I don't think I have ever disagreed with him about something that he liked: he can always explain why and his reasons are always interesting, so that even if I don't like the thing myself, I don't argue with his enthusiasm for it. When he runs things down, I can feel he's talking through his hat: at least once a year he very cleverly, very wittily trashes something that I liked and feel he completely missed the point of. Pacific Rim (2013), for example. I looked up that review for purposes of evidence and I still want to set it on fire.

That was really pure magic.

I like The Invention of Love. It was my introduction to Tom Stoppard and I wish I had been able to see John Wood as Housman; he was important to me. A friend gave me a copy of the play in 2002 and that was how I found out it existed. I get that it does not work for you, but it does not fall outside my acceptable range of retelling of people's lives.

I think with Housman some of the weird archaic-fake diction comes from a consciousness he's writing at the end of that kind of tradition -- Dorothy Parker sometimes falls into it, too, weirdly enough, in some of her early Serious Poems.

I mean specifically in Housman's translations. I don't see it as much in his own poems, where he mixes more antique diction with plainspoken turn-of-the-century English just fine: it doesn't jar for me. I was thinking of stuff like this, where there is no reason for the older forms except, I assume, the conventions of translation, and he had pretty well blown those up.

-- Imagine him and Housman meeting up, now that would be weird. They might bond over Italy tho. Or the Etruscans.

I feel Housman might side-eye Lawrence's tendency to write about Italy in terms of his penis.

[kore]

I don't think Lawrence does that in his poetry, at least not the ones I remember, but never mind.

[sovay]

I don't think Lawrence does that in his poetry, at least not the ones I remember, but never mind.

I bounced horrifyingly off his Sketches of Etruscan Places, which I had expected to like, because of his consistent interpretations of the art and landscape in favor of phallic symbolism. He clearly loved the Etruscans, even if he romanticized them heavily as a primitive, unspoilt culture, so much more sexually liberated than their repressive Roman successors, and he wrote about them with great intensity of language, but it got to the point where I could feel myself internally shouting "SOMETIMES A ROCK IS JUST A ROCK."

[kore]

Yeah, Lawrence's poetry is not like that. His nonfiction is typically his worst work.

[nineweaving]

I once recited "Terence, this is stupid stuff" from the top of Ludlow Castle, to the wind. Highly satisfactory stuff.

Nine

[sovay]

I once recited "Terence, this is stupid stuff" from the top of Ludlow Castle, to the wind.

That sounds very satisfying.

[lauradi7dw]

Until I followed up from this post, I had never read anything by Housman. I thought of him as someone referenced by others. There is a scene in the 1985 "A Room with a View" in which Simon Callow's Mr. Beebe is perusing Mr. Emerson's bookshelf. "A Shropshire Lad. Never heard of it."

In "Strong Poison," Wimsey remarked "'Mithridates, he died old. In this case, I doubt it'" (approximate quote, without rummaging through the book)

[sovay]

Until I followed up from this post, I had never read anything by Housman.

What do you think of him?

I thought of him as someone referenced by others.

That makes sense. I encountered him first without reference, first in the butterfly's quotation-jumbling speech in The Last Unicorn ("Clay lies still, but blood's a rover, so I should be called kill-devil all the parish over") and then in The Dark Is Rising where Will performs a setting of "White in the moon the long road lies," where because I recognized neither allusion, I thought they were Beagle and Cooper's own work at first. I think I caught up to both poems for real in college, but it took a while.

In "Strong Poison," Wimsey remarked "'Mithridates, he died old. In this case, I doubt it'" (approximate quote, without rummaging through the book)

I'd have read that before actual Housman, too.

[lauradi7dw]

The perception that they are song lyrics seems right to me. I am, as mentioned, not wise in the ways of poetry reading. Most of the actual teaching I received in that regard was in 11th grade English, in which the (student) teacher despaired a little bit about us wanting mostly to read song lyrics rather than established poems. Still, she approved of my essay comparing "Richard Cory" as originally written with "Richard Cory" the Simon & Garfunkel version. What a weird thing to remember.
Shropshire Lad in full is available for free download, so I plan to add it to my tablet and read bits of it on planes. From just the comments section of your post, I like his translation better than the originals, but we'll see.