The Cambridge Setting

Extract

The year before Kenelm left Cambridge to enter the Dominican Order, A.E. Housman, in a famous, one might say notorious, lecture on ‘The Name and Nature of Poetry’, on 9 May 1933, deplored the choice made of him as Leslie Stephen lecturer and then said: ‘Whether the faculty of literary criticism is the best gift that Heaven has in its treasuries I cannot say; but Heaven seems to think so, for assuredly it is the gift most charily bestowed. Orators and poets, sages and saints and heroes, if rare in comparison with blackberries, are commoner than returns of Halley’s comet: literary critics are less common’. This lecture by a poet and classical philologist in fact turned out to be an outstandingly original piece of literary criticism and one of the most characteristic utterances of the thirties. In spite of Housman’s gloom it was a time of literary critics of stature, writers who were at home in the borderland between poetry, philosophy and religion, discovering and rediscovering great poets in a rush of intellectual and political excitement. Though Kenelm’s writing work matured later because of his years of religious and theological training, he belonged essentially to the thirties, his seed-bed where, as Bede Bailey said, he remained firmly rooted. This era between two wars had an ‘escape-me-never’ hold on Kenelm and on his contemporaries, particularly those who returned to academic life after the war and all that the war had meant for European life and sensibility.