Lives of the Poets: The History of Poets and Poetry by Michael Schmidt

Author:Michael Schmidt [Schmidt, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Literary Criticism, Poetry
ISBN: 9781781857007
Google: Z9GpBAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Head Of Zeus
Published: 2014-09-08T20:40:22+00:00

“The land of lost content”

A. E. HOUSMAN, RUDYARD KIPLING, ISAAC ROSENBERG, WILFRED OWEN, SIEGFRIED SASSOON, RUPERT BROOKE

How artful and artificial Alfred Edward Housman seems, set beside Stephen Crane. For a long time it was considered a bit de trop for people with literary taste to love, or even to like, Housman’s verse. It belonged to self-pitying adolescence and after that to the mass of readers who don’t like real poetry—whose taste will encompass John Betjeman, Charles Causley and Dylan Thomas but stop short at Hardy, Auden and W. S. Graham. Housman: solitary, sour, homosexual, without a lover, without God. Today it is again possible to confess a liking for his work, though it still hardly figures on the academic syllabus. The unmade bed of Stephen Crane is more critically acceptable than the passionate, cold pillow of Housman.

Yet from the day A Shropshire Lad was published until now he has been a best-selling author. The silence of critics has not affected popular taste. The poems are taken to heart and learned by heart, despite the now mercilessly documented character of the harsh, opinionated professor, the sometimes vindictive classical scholar, the tensely repressed homosexual. The voice of the poems is of an uncannily refined classless purity. He sings—for he seldom speaks in the way of modern poets—the ageless themes of mortality, thwarted love and sacrifice.

He touches two exposed poetic nerves: the nerve that responds to popular ballads, for his poems, in strategy, theme and tone often resemble the anonymous elegiac ballads of the Borders; and the nerve that responds to hymns, though his hymnlike stanzas celebrate no god. We find in his pastoral nostalgia something more than bittersweetness, in his melodies something more than mere song. The poems are above all memorable. Phrases and stanzas come to mind at times of stress, or simply when one is out walking and a landscape or memory suddenly appropriates a stanza. Composers including George Butterworth in 1913 and Ralph Vaughan Williams in 1914 recognized excellent Lieder texts in the poems. (Benjamin Britten, surprisingly, kept his distance, perhaps warded off by Auden.)

What some modern poetry readers look for—grit, real hearts on imaginary sleeves, a deliberate roughening of diction and meter—they do not find in Housman. Formal conservatism and the repetitiveness of mood and tone leave them cold. The raw imperialism of Kipling or the authentic pastoral of Hardy say more to them than the poise of Housman. He is a poet different in kind, his affinities more in the eighteenth and early nineteenth than the twentieth century, yet his poems are not archaic, old-fashioned or conventional. He does something new, yet it has the huge authority of classical and English antecedents. He defines in practice the difference between traditional and merely conventional verse. It would be foolish to pretend that he is a major poet: he has too limited a repertoire, his achievements are in one genre. But he is undeniably a great poet, since he did what he did with genius, finding impersonal idioms to express his deepest hurt.

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