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Housman's Poetic Method: His Lecture and His Notebooks

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Tom Burns Haber
Tom Burns Haber*
Affiliation:
Ohio State University, Columbus 10
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Extract

When A. E. Housman late one afternoon in May 1933 was delivering his Leslie Stephen Lecture on “The Name and Nature of Poetry,” there may have been some nodding heads in the Senate House audience, but only up to the moment he began to speak of his own methods of composition. He had over the years earned a reputation for the obduracy with which he repelled inquiry into this forbidden subject, but on this occasion he ended with a personal confession which his hearers debated long after they forgot his definition of poetry.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 69 , Issue 5 , December 1954 , pp. 1000 - 1016
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1954

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References

1 The Name and Nature of Poetry (Cambridge, Eng., 1950), pp. 49-50. There were several who professed to be able to identify the stanzas, but to forestall all I-told-you-so's Housman destroyed the page of his Notebook containing this poem. See Laurence Housman, My Brother, A. E. Housman (New York, 1938), pp. 207, 255.

2 In this process 136 concealed portions of manuscript came to light.

3 These symbols are used to refer to the 4 sections of the Collected Poems: ASL, A Shropshire Lad; LP, Last Poems; MP, More Poems; AP, Additional Poems.

4 The 2 sheets immediately preceding B 144 have been destroyed. It is possible that in their contents (which Laurence's “Analysis” annotates as “Fragments and single lines”) there may have been other parts of LP 18.

5 This is proved by the publication date, 24 Feb. 1900, of Illic Jacet (LP 4), the first draft of which was written on B 191, 16 pages after the entry for LP 18. Herbert Housman's death occurred 30 Oct. 1901.

6 There are 94 annotations of this nature covering perhaps more than 200 pages.

7 See, e.g., Edith. Sitwell in Trio (London, 1936), p. 105.

8 Even 2-stanza poems had to be put to rights. The latter quatrain of If it chance your eye offend you (ASL 45) was composed near the top of B 66; below came an unrelated couplet and one or two more lines and last the opening stanza of the poem. On A232 the second strophe of Look not in my eyes (ASL 15) was done before the first. (The poem consists of two 8-line stanzas.) All told, the drafts of at least 20 poems show indecision in their stanza sequence.

9 See Carter and Sparrow, A. E. Housman: An Annotated Hand-List (London, 1952), p. 38.

10 See the “Note on the Text” in The Collected Poems of A. E. Housman (London, 1952), p. 248. In the 14th “impression” of this volume, issued by Cape in December 1953, about 40 errors in the printing of MP and AP were corrected, among them the fault in MP 34. About as many other editorial lapses remain to be rectified.

11 In an unpublished letter to F. C. Owlett (8 Oct. 1930) now in the Yale Univ. Library.