The Poet of Unhappiness

Wendy Cope writes thoughtfully of A.E. Housman and assembles a generous sampler of his poems at the “Poet on the Poet of the Week” feature on the Carcanet Press web site:

“The despair in these poems is that of a man facing life and death without religious belief, and without marriage or a lover. Housman was a homosexual, in an age when homosexual behaviour was punishable by imprisonment. The bleak music of his poems about lost, unrequited or impossible love moves many readers, including me, to tears.”

I can’t think of another poet about whom I’ve had such wildly variable feelings. When very young, his melancholy and the seeming simplicity of his line attracted me. I found his poems “moody,” in what now seems the worst sense. And for that reason, I lost interest in his work after I discovered Eliot and Auden (both qualified admirers of Housman). Only in the last few years have I reevaluated his work and found it not only beautiful but heartbreaking – in the best sense. John Berryman was another unlikely admirer of Housman. In his Paris Review interview, a year before his suicide, Berryman told Peter A. Stitt:

“Housman is one of my heroes and always has been. He was a detestable and miserable man. Arrogant, unspeakably lonely, cruel, and so on, but an absolutely marvelous minor poet, I think, and a great scholar.”

Berryman, an inveterate Freudian, must have sensed his estimation of Housman, while heartfelt, was pure projection. For a more nuanced appreciation, here’s “Dream Song 205”:

“Come & dance, Housman’s hopeless heroine
bereft of all: I take you in me arms
burnt-cork:
your creator is studying his celestial sphere,
he never loved you, he never loved a woman
or a man, save one: he was a fork

“saved by his double genius & certain emendations
All his long life, hopeless lads grew cold
He drew their death-masks
To listen to him, you’d think that growing old
at twenty-two was horrible, and the ordinary tasks
of people didn’t exist.

“He did his almost perfect best with what he had
Shades are sorrowing, as not called up
By in his genius him
Others are for his life-long omission glad
& published their works as soon as he came to a stop
& could not review them.”

Between them, Berryman and Housman define “fork.” Yet another admirer of Housman was Philip Larkin, who judged him “the poet of unhappiness,” a title Larkin might have claimed as his own. As he said famously in his Observer interview:

“It’s very difficult to write about being happy. Very easy to write about being miserable. And I think writing about unhappiness is probably the source of my popularity, if I have any – after all most people are unhappy, don’t you think?”

In his review of a Housman biography, Larkin cited “XXVII” from More Poems as evidence of Housman’s unhappy Muse:

“To stand up straight and tread the turning mill,
To lie flat and know nothing and be still,
Are the two trades of man; and which is worse
I know not, but I know that both are ill.”

Without the help of certain poets and their gift for unhappiness, would we even know what unhappiness is?