Posthumous publications published by Laurence Housman

Summary

Housman was dead and buried but he was to have an immediate afterlife as a poet. He had appointed his brother Laurence as his literary executor:

I direct my said brother Laurence Housman to destroy all my prose manuscript writing in whatever language and I permit him but do not enjoin him to select from my verse manuscript writing and to publish any poems which appear to him to be completed and to be not inferior in quality to the average of my published poems and I DIR ECT him to destroy all other poems and fragments of verse.

Laurence both obeyed and disobeyed his elder brother. He took his brother's words as a green light to publish what he wished.

Before the year was out, Laurence published More Poems, a collection of forty-nine poems. Most existed in manuscript and four had been published before. However, Laurence cobbled together five verses from one of his brother's notebooks and three verses from another notebook, to make a single poem. He also combined three separate and seemingly unrelated quatrains to make another poem. Laurence seems broadly to have done his duty but could not resist the temptation to add his own creative touches.

A year later, in 1937, Laurence published his A.E.H., containing twenty-three additional poems. Of these, all but four were backed by manuscripts, yet again Laurence could not resist his own creative impulse, using two separate fragments from the notebooks to create a single poem, and publishing seven poems of only four lines each.

Laurence further disobeyed his instructions by not destroying the four notebooks; instead he tore them apart, discarded some sheets, cut up the remainder and pasted down the pieces on larger sheets. This is not the place to elaborate on that process or its results. Suffice to say the final resting place of the mutilated notebooks was mainly in the United States Library of Congress where ‘165 folio sheets arranged in 7 groupings … 266 manuscript pieces … glued to 149 of the sheets’ provided a textual mishmash for scholars and literary archaeologists to puzzle over. Laurence had created just the sort of textual mess Housman had worked all his life to avoid.