[In the following excerpt, Leggett provides an overview of the critical reception—or lack of critical attention—of Housman's poetry.]

Any assessment of A. E. Housman's present stature as a poet must begin with the well-known but curious fact that his poetry, while it has become widely read and even highly regarded in some circles, has failed to give rise to a significant body of criticism. In an age of close reading and analysis, no systematic study of Housman's poetry has been attempted. The commentaries which have been produced are given, on the whole, to discussions of Housman's pessimism or to probings of the personality which seems to lie beneath the surface of his poems. The last decade has witnessed some fragmentary efforts to re-examine his poetic contribution, but it remains essentially true that few critics have become involved with Housman's art. In 1945, Robert W. Stallman's critical bibliography revealed that of the 177 poems in The Collected Poems of A. E. Housman only 27 had been analyzed in whole or in part.¹ In 1958, Norman Marlow, in a biography of Housman, found little change, stating that “there is still no comprehensive study of his poetry and very little balanced criticism of it.”² More than a decade has passed, and the same assessment may be offered with little qualification; yet Housman's reputation has grown appreciably since his death in 1936, as William White has shown in a survey of the increasing use of his poems in anthologies and the frequency of their reissue in collections.³

The lack of critical attention paid to a poet of Housman's standing would appear strange indeed were there not compelling reasons for it, not the least of which is the nature of the verse he produced. The notion has persisted that the simplicity and directness of Housman's poetry obviates the necessity for close analysis. A year after the poet's death, Louis Kronenberger found that not much remained to be said about Housman's art: “One could hardly tie him in with anything very original concerning life itself, or explain at great length a philosophy that was almost self-explanatory, or find special meaning in him that the rest of the world has neglected to find.”⁴ Kronenberger's feeling that the nature of Housman's verse precludes any kind of detailed criticism is obviously shared by later critics. Oliver Robinson issued in 1950 what he called a critical essay on Housman's poetry, but his discussion of the poems amounts to no more than noting certain themes and quoting the lines in which they appear. Significantly, he remarks that “usually the poems are self-explanatory.”⁵ Certainly no opinion was so predominant among Housman's early commentators as that which asserted that his verses are marked by an essential simplicity of form and thought,⁶ and this view is still in evidence today.

While Housman's clarity and directness have been praised widely,⁷ the singular nature of his poetry has without question retarded any serious attempt at the kind of analysis which has enriched the poetry of many of his contemporaries. Furthermore, the assumption of the critics that a simplicity of form produces a self-explanatory poetry is misleading, if not completely invalid; yet this early view of Housman's verse has not been successfully challenged. If Housman's poetry is indeed self-explanatory, one ought to find substantial agreement on the interpretation of his poems, but this has not been the case. Stallman, who classified the views of Housman's commentators in 1945, found that the critics disagreed on almost every point of Housman criticism.⁸

The truth is that Housman's poetry is more subtle and more complex than has been acknowledged by his commentators. Part of the problem lies in a confusion between the simplicity of the forms which Housman inherited and followed and his own distinctive use of these forms.⁹ Both the ballad and the pastoral, the two genres which inform his verse, are marked by a surface simplicity; and it is obvious that the directness of the ballad and the ironic naïveté of the pastoral control the tone of his poetry. But only rarely have critics looked beneath the smooth surface of his poems to glimpse the perplexities of his themes and structures.

What has concerned Housman's critics since the publication of A Shropshire Lad in 1896 is the enigma of Housman the man as it is reflected in his verse. He has suffered, like Byron, from the fact that his personality is of more interest to many readers than his poetry, and that for some scholars the poetry is valuable only as a key to the personality. It must be admitted that the portrait of the man emerging from the biographies encourages such a concern, for Housman's life produced a series of minor crises which scholars have attempted to relate to the tragic view of life which permeates his poetry. The death of Housman's mother on his twelfth birthday, his sister Katherine Symons reports, had such a lasting effect on him that death became an obsession.¹⁰ His failure in the Greats examinations at Oxford disgraced him in the eyes of his family and caused him to seek refuge in London for a time as a civil servant. The death of his father in 1894 not only constituted a personal loss but also threw him into extreme financial difficulties. Finally, his relationship with Moses Jackson, a fellow student at Oxford, was the source of deep emotional scars, climaxed in 1887 by Jackson's departure for India after the friendship was strained, some scholars infer, by an unnatural attachment on Housman's part.¹¹

But Housman's personality would perhaps not have attracted so much critical attention were it not, again, for the nature of his poetry. The formal and metrical simplicity of Housman's lyrics has directed interest away from the poetry itself, toward the personality which seems to be revealed. It is a poetry, says Stephen Spender, which seems to hide “some nagging Housmanish secret.”¹² Spender is intrigued, as are a number of other critics, by the autobiographical tone of the poems and the suggestion that personal tragedy is concealed in the poetry.¹³ This sense of personal tragedy is no doubt prompted by the lads of Shropshire who are obsessed with death even in the prime of life, who grieve for departed friends and express a sense of guilt for nameless sins. The assumption that such an obsession with guilt and death must have its basis in some deep-seated psychological disorder has consequently led to the notion that Housman's poetry is merely the embodiment of his personal dilemma. It has also been responsible for the widely held dictum that Housman's personality must be seen as the key to his poetry and the resulting corollary that the poetry may contain the key to his personality.¹⁴

It is obvious that such an approach, although interesting and perhaps ultimately valuable in an understanding of the genesis of creativity, dangerously undermines any effort to consider Housman's poetry on its own merits, apart from biographical considerations. John K. Ryan illustrates the problems involved when he insists on “intimate sources” for Housman's poetry and suggests that Housman, as a poet, presents a special problem which cannot be solved by conventional methods.¹⁵ Other examples of this attitude, which came into prominence before Housman's death, are widespread. Ultimately, it led to the critical position that the poems, as transmutations of the poet's experience, could not be explained until he revealed the clue.¹⁶

Housman, of course, revealed no such clue. In fact, he repeatedly denied that one existed. In a letter to a French student who had inquired about the personal basis of his poetry he replied, “The Shropshire Lad is an imaginary figure, with something of my temperament and view of life. Very little in the book is biographical.”¹⁷ He further said, in regard to some supposed crisis that had produced his pessimistic philosophy:

I have never had any such thing as a “crisis of pessimism.” In the first place, I am not a pessimist but a “pejorist” (as George Eliot said she was not an optimist but a meliorist); and that is owing to my observation of the world, not to personal circumstances. Secondly, I did not begin to write poetry in earnest until the really emotional part of my life was over; and my poetry, as far as I could make out, sprang chiefly from physical conditions, such as a relaxed sore throat during my most prolific period, the first five months of 1895.¹⁸

This statement is supported by another, solicited by Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, who wrote in My Diaries of a conversation with Housman in which he asked the poet whether there was any episode in his life which suggested the gruesome character of his poems. “Housman assured me it was not so. He had lived as a boy in Worcestershire, not in Shropshire, though within sight of the Shropshire hills, and there was nothing gruesome to record.”¹⁹

Here perhaps the matter should have rested, but the “nagging Housmanish secret” of the poetry has continued to over-shadow the poet's own statements. Doubtless Housman, like all poets, relied heavily on his personal experiences and emotions to provide the materials for his art. Yet to insist that his poetry can be understood only in a biographical context, the position of the early commentators, is to limit unnecessarily the range of criticism and to subordinate the poetry to the poet. At its furthest extreme, this approach finds worth in the poetry only as it explains the character of the poet, and the biographical critics thus turn Housman into a psychological case study.²⁰ Their tendency is to make use of the poetry only as a guide to the poet, and the result is a failure to interpret Housman's poetry as poetry. Furthermore, although a great part of existing Housman criticism is based on biographical conjecture, no significant results are evident. Housman continues to be read and studied for irrelevant reasons, and his critical standing has no doubt been damaged as a consequence.

Housman's reputation has been further injured by a similar tendency to regard his poetry as philosophy. Because he chose to consider in his poems some of the great commonplaces of life—the transience of human existence, the fear of oblivion in death, the injustice of man's condition on earth—he was early labeled a “message” poet, more specifically a pessimist, and his poetry has been dismissed frequently on these grounds. The preoccupation with the philosophical import of Housman's works has taken several forms, but the weight of opinion is that his philosophical beliefs, being unsound, prevent the appreciation or enjoyment of his poetry.²¹ In short, many commentators have pronounced Housman a philosophical poet only to reject his poetry because they found his philosophy to be perverse or inconsequential. Cleanth Brooks concludes that Housman is not even the perfect minor poet, for he “had no … world view to set up. Intellectually, he has not moved far past an austere scepticism.”²² The other charge which has been leveled frequently against Housman's thought is its apparent inconsistency—the poems have no standard of value and are thus at odds with each other, Housman answers the philosophical questions he raises in contradictory ways, and his beliefs baffle the reader and fail to advance his understanding.²³

These would be valid objections if Housman's achievement were philosophic rather than aesthetic. If, as John K. Ryan said of Housman, “the appeal and power of the philosophical poet must ultimately rest on his thoughts rather than on the way he expresses them,”²⁴ then Housman may easily be dismissed, for he obviously failed to advance any kind of sound philosophical system. But such an approach has serious drawbacks. No harm is done in speaking on the colloquial level of the “philosophy” of a poet, but to apply the criteria of philosophy to poetry may lead to confusion. For example, to say that a philosophical statement is contradictory is to discredit it. Yet Cleanth Brooks, who objects to Housman on philosophical grounds, has devoted an entire volume to showing that “paradox is the language appropriate and inevitable to poetry. It is the scientist whose truth requires a language purged of every trace of paradox. …”²⁵ Again, clarity and specificity are virtues of the language of philosophy, but modern criticism has held that one characteristic of good poetry is ambiguity, the ability of a poetic statement to convey two or more sometimes conflicting meanings simultaneously. One could continue such a distinction almost indefinitely, but it should be clear that poetry is not philosophy, and a confusion between the two is always injurious to the poet. It is to be doubted that Housman's poetry can be understood sufficiently if it is seen only as a set of truths to be accepted or denied.

His poetry cannot be explained by reference to a philosophical system or a set of beliefs. Any attempt to do so violates the distinctive nature of poetry and ignores the valuable lessons of much modern criticism. It also ignores Housman's own aesthetic principles, which he advanced in the Leslie Stephen Lecture for 1933, entitled The Name and Nature of Poetry. Here Housman stated clearly and unmistakably that, for him, poetry was not thought, but emotion. He said: “I think that to transfuse emotion—not to transmit thought but to set up in the reader's sense a vibration corresponding to what was felt by the writer—is the peculiar function of poetry.” The essence of poetry for Housman is not the abstracted thought but its expression: “Poetry is not the thing said but a way of saying it.” He even denies that poetry is a product of the intellect: “Meaning is of the intellect, poetry is not … the intellect is not the fount of poetry … it may actually hinder its production.”²⁶

What is more, men who knew Housman well have attested to the fact that he was not interested in philosophy. Canon J. T. Nance, who was a tutor in St. John's College, Oxford, when Housman was a scholar there, has written: “… Housman did not take any interest in Greek philosophy. His interests were in pure scholarship.”²⁷ Percy Withers reports that once when he attempted to discuss with Housman some questions in metaphysics, Housman replied angrily, “That is a subject I will not discuss.” Withers thus concludes that Housman objected to “the whole realm of philosophic thought.”²⁸ It is strange then, in view of so much evidence of his hostility to philosophical analysis and abstraction, that Housman should be regarded by many as a poet of thought, for the essence of his poetry lies, in his own words, not in the thing said, but in a way of saying it.

Notes

1. “Annotated Bibliography of A. E. Housman: A Critical Study,” PMLA, LX (1945), 463.

2. A. E. Housman: Scholar and Poet (Minneapolis, 1958), p. vii.

3. “A. E. Housman Anthologized: Evidence in the Growth of a Poet's Reputation,” Bulletin of Bibliography, XXI (1953), 43-48, 68-72.

4. “A Note on A. E. Housman,” Nation, CXLV (Dec. 18, 1937), 690.

5. Angry Dust: The Poetry of A. E. Housman (Boston, 1950), p. 22.

6. See, for example, H. P. Collins, Modern Poetry (London, 1925), p. 74; Ian Scott-Kilvert, A. E. Housman (London, 1955), p. 26; Louis Untermeyer, Modern American Poetry; Modern British Poetry (New York, 1942), II, 102; Herbert Gorman, The Procession of Masks (Boston, 1923), p. 171; James Brannin, “Alfred Housman,” Sewanee Review, XXXIII (1925), 192-94; and Rica Brenner, “Alfred Edward Housman,” in Ten Modern Poets (New York, 1930), p. 188.

7. There are exceptions. Edith Sitwell objected that “this admired simplicity of his seems not so much the result of passion finding its expression in an inevitable phrase … as the result of a bare and threadbare texture” (“Three Eras of Modern Poetry,” in Trio by Osbert, Edith, and Sacheverell Sitwell [London, 1938], p. 104). Other critics have described Housman's style as “threadbare”; for example, Conrad Aiken in New Republic, LXXXIX (Nov. 11, 1936), 51-52, and Edwin Muir in London Mercury, XXXV (1936), 63.

8. Stallman, p. 480.

9. See Elisabeth Schneider, Aesthetic Motive (New York, 1939), for a discussion of this problem with special reference to Housman.

10. Alfred Edward Housman: Recollections, by Katherine E. Symons, et al. (New York, 1937), p. 8.

11. The biographies by both George Watson (A. E. Housman: A Divided Life [London, 1957]) and Maude M. Hawkins (A. E. Housman: Man Behind a Mask [Chicago, 1958]) propose the theory that Housman was homosexually attracted to Jackson.

12. “The Essential Housman,” in The Making of a Poem (London, 1955), p. 159.

13. Ibid., p. 162.

14. George Watson stated in his biography of Housman: “In this study … his poetry becomes the indispensable key to a personality which even those who knew him best always confessed to finding adamantine” (p. 11).

15. “Defeatist as Poet,” Catholic World, CXLI (1935), 35.

16. See Rica Brenner, p. 191. For further examples of this view see J. P. Bishop, “The Poetry of A. E. Housman,” Poetry, LVI (1940), 150; Lawrence Leighton, “One View of Housman,” Poetry, LII (1938), 95; H. W. Garrod, “Housman: 1939,” Essays and Studies, XXV (1939), 7-21; and A. F. Allison, “The Poetry of A. E. Housman,” Review of English Studies, XIX (1943), 279.

17. Quoted in Marlow, p. 150.

18. Ibid.

19. Quoted in Richards [Richards, Grant. Housman 1897-1936. New York: Oxford University Press, 1942.], pp. 105-106.

20. Benjamin Brooks, for example, has stated that the “poetic reasons” for accepting Housman died away with the Georgians, and it is only personal and psychological reasons which make him of interest today (“A. E. Housman's Collected Poetry,” Nineteenth Century, CXXVIII [1940], 71). Ernest Moss, who finds in Housman “a longing for return to the elemental womb,” concludes that “it is improbable that the mass of his work can be enjoyed as poetry” (quoted in Stallman, p. 484).

21. See Stallman's critical bibliography of Housman for a classification of the conflicting views on Housman's philosophy.

22. “The Whole of Housman,” Kenyon Review, III (1941), 105-106. R. P. Blackmur concurs that Housman “was not a great minor poet”; he was not a profound thinker but “a desperately solemn purveyor of a single adolescent emotion” (The Expense of Greatness [Gloucester, Mass., 1958], pp. 202, 204). Even Louis MacNeice, who is generally sympathetic to Housman, holds that although Housman's philosophy is essential to his poetry, it has very little meaning (“Housman in Retrospect,” New Republic, CII [1940], 583).

23. These three views, respectively, were advanced by Jacob Bronowski (p. 221), Hugh Molson (“The Philosophies of Hardy and Housman,” Quarterly Review, CCLXVIII [1937], 207-208), and Lawrence Leighton (p. 98).

24. Ryan, p. 34.

25. The Well Wrought Urn (New York, 1947), p. 3.

26. A. E. Housman: Selected Prose, ed. by John Carter (New York, 1961), pp. 172, 187-88.

27. Quoted in Richards, p. 322.

28. Ibid., pp. 57-58.