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The Name and Nature of Poetry: and Other Selected Prose

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Somewhere in London there is, I am told, a commemorative plaque to Housman denoting him 'poet and scholar'. The man would have been outraged - 'scholar and poet' if you please: he would have been content with 'professor of Latin' and no mention of his poetry at all. Obviously he is better known to a general posterity for 'A Shropshire Lad' than for his three great editions of Latin poets and the great mass of contributions that he made to the learned classical periodicals, or even for his comparatively well-known inaugural address when he was given his first chair at University College London. It is his poetry that sells him, and this book has accordingly taken for its title in this new edition the title of an address that he was persuaded to give in the field of literary criticism, which he protests himself (a bit too much) to be unfitted for.

I find his 'Name and Nature of Poetry' to be both insightful and brilliantly entertaining. Whatever you think about Housman's poetry, he was one of the finest and purest stylists in prose ever to have graced the English language. However you will not find much more here about poetry. There is a fragment of a talk he gave to a literary society in London University on Matthew Arnold, which is hilariously amusing; there is a letter to The Times offering a textual emendation to the commonly printed version of a poem by Keats; there is a review of a volume of the Cambridge History of English Literature; and that's it as far as poetry and literary criticism are concerned. There are some other items outside his normal area of operations, particularly an interesting historical review and some decidedly uninteresting bits of formal welcome he was asked to do for visits to Cambridge by the King. As for the rest, he sticks to his last.

Housman specified unequivocally in his will that his brother Lawrence Housman should act as his literary executor with strict instructions that any hitherto unpublished prose should be destroyed, although he might publish any further poetry that he came across. The fragment of the paper on Arnold is a clear breach of his wishes in this respect, but his second inaugural address, at Cambridge, escaped Mr Carter and has had to wait for a slightly later book before becoming another such breach. Housman's anxiety has a clear cause - anything in prose might be related to his true professional reputation as a scholar, and he would not risk compromising that. Poetry he was not worried about. What we have here, in a strictly scholarly vein, are lengthy sections from his famous prefaces to Manilius and Juvenal, sundry extracts from learned articles and reviews, his scarifying address The Application of Thought to Textual Criticism with its deliberate humiliation of the people he was addressing, and one review given in full. You do not need much Latin, indeed none, to get the full flavour and benefit of these pieces. Housman himself noted once that of the five volumes of his Manilius only the first had sold out because 'it found purchasers among the unlearned who had heard that it contained a scurrilous preface from which they hoped to extract a low enjoyment'. Carter's general purpose in this edition is to communicate the said low enjoyment, and he cuts out for the most part anything of too learned or too technical a nature. Housman was brilliantly witty, and a brilliant intellect. The exasperation that wrung some of the more wounding attacks out of him was the exasperation of a scholar who saw his trade being prostituted by duffers, idlers and phonies, but it amounts in my own opinion to a great deal more than the standard bitching that learned periodicals in any discipline tend to be full of. The study of Greek and Latin is a matter of making sense of things, and the greatest practitioners of textual criticism of Greek and Latin authors are colossal figures indeed. What Housman adds in particular is not just his unique power of expression, but a conceptual framework round the process, a veritable paradigm of how to think straight.

I certainly extract a low enjoyment out of the parts where I am intended to do just that. In terms of how to write my own language, and above all in terms of how to use my brains such as they are, I have extracted a lot more. In a highly specialised department, namely how to put together a review, I have an example second to none in the full-dress specimen contained in this book.