Nineteen-twenty-two, just a century ago, is judged an annus miribilis by literary folk, the high-water mark of Modernism. The roll-call of summits is known to all: Ulysses, Sodome et Gomorrhe, Petersburg, The Girl on the Boat, The Waste Land, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. And at a lower elevation: The Beautiful and Damned and Jacob’s Room.
Most of
these books deserve our admiration but for this reader the unchallenged Book of
the Year for 1922 was the modestly titled Last Poems. Have you read it? Auden says of its author: “Deliberately he chose
the dry-as-dust, / Kept tears like dirty postcards in a drawer.” And Philip Larkin, no
mean judge of misery, writes of him: “For Housman is the poet of unhappiness;
no one else has reiterated his single message so plangently.”
A.E. Housman writes
for grownups who remember what it felt like to be on the cusp of being
grownups. As a poet, while never adolescent himself, he retained a vivid
understanding of adolescence and its taste for melodrama – a subtle
distinction, I know, but crucial for appreciating his delicately calibrated
verse. See XI from Last Poems:
“Yonder see
the morning blink:
The sun is up, and up must I,
To wash and dress and eat and drink
And look at things and talk and think
And work, and God knows why.
“Oh often
have I washed and dressed
And what’s to show for all my pain?
Let me lie abed and rest:
Ten thousand times I’ve done my best
And all’s to do again.”
This might be a teenager contemplating the dreary mundanity of life as an adult. Or it might be a gifted classicist considering his unfulfilled life, one of Henry James’ “poor, sensitive gentlemen.” Housman died on this date, April 30, in 1936, at age seventy-seven.
3 comments:
My junior school English teacher had a story about being at a dinner at Trinity, and there was a lull in the conversation, when Housman could be heard to say: “The greatest living master of the English language is…”
All the room went silent to hear the wisdom of the grand old man
“…PG Wodehouse.”
I think a lot about this.
Was he joking? This must have been in the 40s or 50s, when Wodehouse may have been cancelled because of his war broadcasts.
The teacher told us the story to encourage us to read Wodehouse, whom I had just discovered.
I love this. Just got back from London, where the first bookstore I went into had a whole wall of Wodehouse titles. People were standing around taking pictures of it.
Housman is one of my favorite poets. "A Shropshire Lad" and others in his collected poems. Thank you for reminding me of his importance as a master of the art.
Post a Comment