A Note on A. E. Housman

Extract

I.

After an interval of sixteen years, Mr. A. E. Housman has given us a sequel to A Shropshire Lad. During that time one might naturally have expected the Lad of 1896 to have arrived at manhood’s estate; expected, perhaps, from the poet a hero with a different philosophy of life, and an experience ripened by almost a score of years. Mr. Housman could so easily have made his character grow up, see with new eyes, and speak with a new tongue. That is what would have happened in the case of any other poet who was not the supreme artist Mr. Housman has proved himself to be. For in Last Poems (absit omen !) he is still in the same mood as in A Shropshire Lad, and has thus demonstrated the artistic unity of his work.

That is the crowning triumph of his poetry. The hundred and five poems that make up these two volumes, and that represent, say, twenty years work, are really just one poem looked at and presented in one hundred and five different ways. Just as one person may have a hundred striking experiences in two decades of life without losing his individuality, or breaking up his personality into little pieces; or an air may have a hundred variations; so one rich mood of imagination has sufficed for Mr. Housman to enrich our literature with a hundred poems. He struck one precious seam of gold and worked it faithfully to the end.

How he worked it we are told with a charming (and pathetic ?) simplicity at the beginning of Last Poems. 41 can no longer expect to be re-visited by the continuous excitement under which in the early months of 1895 I wrote the greater part of my other book, nor indeed could I well sustain it if it came . . . About a quarter of this matter {Last Poems) belongs to the April of the present year, but most of it to dates between 1895 and 1910/