Collected Poems and Selected Prose (Twentieth Century Classics) [Paperback]

Obviously he is best known for his poetry. He was, or affected to be, surprised by the popular success of A Shropshire Lad with its pervasive fixation with death, but the reason is easy to see -- Housman's poetry is catchy. It has 'tingle-factor' in a big way, and the deadly simplicity haunts the memory

'So here I'll watch the night and wait
To see the morning shine
When he will hear the stroke of eight
And not the stroke of nine'
(of a man due to be hanged the next morning). In The Name and Nature of Poetry he makes a very entertaining attempt, largely at the expense of the eighteenth century style, to explain what poetry meant to him, but he gets the point across far better and more briefly in an address on Swinburne when he says 'poetry is a tone of voice, a way of saying things'. That illuminates the matter far better for me than any amount of pretentious lit crit.

The finest and most characteristic of all his poems is in Latin, the dedication of his great edition of Manilius to Moses Jackson. Those who have been privileged to study Greek and Latin while they were still mainstream subjects are not likely to forget its last four lines, among the most awesome in any language I can read, but in general I go along with the assessment of him as 'an absolutely marvellous minor poet'. As a scholar he was among the greatest, and he enlivened the dusty pages of classical scholarship with some of the most entertaining prose I have ever read. His address to the Classical Association is entitled uncompromisingly The Application of Thought to Textual Criticism, and his final words to his 'peers' -- 'one thing above all others is necessary, and that is to have a head, not a pumpkin, on your shoulders, and brains, not pudding, in your head' is only one specimen I can never forget. 'The habit of treading in ruts and trooping in companies that men share with sheep' or 'Stoeber's reprint of Bentley's text, with a commentary intended to refute it, saw the light in 1767 in Strasbourg, a city still famous for its geese' are others.

I neither know nor care what his relationship with Jackson amounted to in practice other than that Jackson was the love of his life. He did not hesitate to to publish in the press his brilliant satirical poem on the imprisonment of Oscar Wilde, and I gather there was a tacit understanding among the dons of Trinity never to refer to his poetry. That poem ends with another of his great fixations
'He can curse the God that made him for the colour of his hair.' Like other notable atheists, e.g. Johannes Brahms, Housman knew the scriptures inside-out and he made witty use of them -- I treasure in particular the scholar who 'has rendered Greek nonsense into English nonsense and gone on his way rejoicing'.

The photograph of him on the cover of this book is more favourable than many others which make him look as if he was descended from a long line of maiden aunts, as someone once said. Be that as it may, I recommend this book to anyone not yet familiar with a great mind and a brilliant and fascinating writer.