Here I encounter yet again the bothersome issue of major vs. minor writers. When “minor” is used as a purely dismissive judgment, beware. There are minor writers who write beautifully and earn our respect and even love – Max Beerbohm is the first who comes to mind – and others who never transcend their triviality. Say, Carl Sandburg. No serious reader reads Shakespeare exclusively, and consider the poor soul who consumes a steady diet of Sandburg.
I was surprised in 2023
when The European Conservative, of all journals, published an essay titled
“A.E. Housman, Poet and Pessimist” by the American writer Thomas Banks. He
makes his judgment clear in the first sentence: “[I]t is not likely that either
the critic or the lay reader would represent him as a major poet.” To
substantiate his conclusion, Banks cites the relatively small quantity of poems
Housman produced and continues: “Additionally, the verse he wrote, though for
quality it is one of the most even bodies of composition in the English
language, is as slender in its themes as it is slight in its volume.”
Does “slender in its themes”
mean Housman’s themes are small in number or trivial in substance? There’s no
law obligating poets to address some phantom number of subjects, and it’s surely
not the latter. Consider XL from A Shropshire Lad, a poem that has mysteriously charmed me since I was a teenager:
“Into my heart an air that
kills
From yon far country blows:
What are those blue
remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?
“That is the land of lost
content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I
went
And cannot come again.”
I’ve been reading Landor
lately and was pleased to see Banks liken him to Housman:
“Housman was not a dry
man, and he cast less peaceful and somber a shadow on the page than he probably
thought. Something like Walter Savage Landor’s ‘I strove with none, for none
was worth my strife’ does not really get at the heart of the man, for in truth,
Housman was professionally combative and none to suffer fools gladly. The same,
ironically, could be said for the Romanesque Landor himself, whose notoriously
acrimonious nature gives the lie to ‘The Dying Speech of the Old Philosopher.’”
Housman was Kingsley Amis’ favorite poet and Philip Larkin called him, with Larkin-esque authority, “the poet of unhappiness,” though he added provocatively that Housman “seems to have been a very nice man.” In more than his devotion to Juvenal, Housman reminds me of no other writer so much as Dr. Johnson. Consider the hatred of cant they shared, the passionate, sometimes tortured inner lives they led, and their devotion to scholarship. Banks respects Housman enough to take him seriously and not trivialize his poems. Nothing is accomplished by labeling a writer “major” or “minor,” except perhaps discouraging future readers. Banks acknowledges that Housman left us “a few poems of exquisite perfectionism.” He writes well, never raises the subject of Housman’s homosexuality and proves he has a sense of humor:
“Creation was for him pulvis
et umbrae [dust and shadows] and no more, in spite of any appearance to the
contrary. The vision addresses itself to the reader in nearly everything he
wrote, and never is it mitigated by even an occasional coloring of optimism.
The narrator of quite a number of the Shropshire poems tenders the eternal
consolation of the glum, that at least our lot now is no worse than anyone’s
ever was, and the present is no blacker than the past or future. The Valley of
the Shadow of Death has no sunny uplands at either end of it, so let us study
perseverance at the expense of hope. Of all mature attitudes, this is one of
the least enviable. So, concluding, he was not one for causes. An intensely
private man, he is a monument to a time, long since lost to us, when not every
man or woman of letters felt the urge to pester the editor about the evils of
processed food or Big Tobacco.”
Housman was born on this
date, March 26, in 1859 and died at age seventy-seven in 1936. Go here and here
to read more by Thomas Banks, a first-rate writer.
2 comments:
My classics tutor at Queens' Cambridge was James Diggle, editor with Frank Goodyear, of the Collected Classical Papers of A.E. Housman. Diggle was slightly obsessed with Housman and in our first tutorial he emerged from an ante-room with the fez that Housman used to wear and the pen with which he made his many emendations. We were also presented with the famous pen and ink drawing of Housman that features in the frontpiece to the collected papers.
Thank you, Editor, for that interesting and amusing (the fez!) comment. I came late to the enjoyment of poetry--that is, in my early twenties--and have also been held in thrall by those quoted lines of Housman for the sixty years since the day I first read them. Why are they so powerful? My chosen field of study led me far from my native northeastern United States, and I spent the larger part of my adult life in the Far East, where my "land of lost content" was always New England. However, now that I have been back in the States for a quarter century, though confined to the West Coast, I find that my far-eastern second country has mysteriously acquired the same power of nostalgia as New England, so the words of the poem conjure up images of two quite different places, both beloved.
I think it is one of the saddest experiences of old age (the deaths of loved ones aside) to realize that many of our favorite remembered places are no longer as they were when they claimed our affection. Even if you can revisit the actual location, in the most important sense, it is likely not to be there any more, but resides in your heart, whence it makes painful sallies.
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