Laureate of Youth

Fifty years ago, A. E. Housman published, at his own expense, the first edition of A Shropshire Lad. The latest edition, which does homage to that event, is published by the Colby Library in Waterville, Me. Readers who cannot get one of the 500 copies of this Jubilee Edition* will miss: 1) a rare reminder that book designing is an art, not a packaging job; 2) a rare photograph of the poet at about the time he was writing his first volume; 3) a set of notes which should interest any admirer of Housman's poetry.

They will also get a reminder of the little-known, proud, self-secluded man who was not only one of England's finest lyric poets, but also one of the three or four great classical scholars of our time. His scholarly notes, reviews, letters and conversation contained a deftness of wit which Pope could hardly equal, and blasts of virulence which Swift could hardly surpass. But the anniversary chiefly celebrates Housman's poetry. Why has it been so much loved, by so many; and how, after 50 years, does it stand up?

Housman wrote very few lines in his life, even the bad ones, which did not have the qualities quintessential to true poetry. Moreover, his lines are as simple in feeling as they are in language. Their obsessions are with love, sorrow, courage, loneliness, comradeship, death, the delicate and enduring beauty of the world, and the transient and dubious beauty of living in it. Such emotions are of great and unchangeable vividness to human beings who, having peered into the world's Gorgon face, have lost their childhood, but not yet their heart. They, above all people, are Housman's audience.

Not many of his poems fail somewhere to embarrass mature readers for the poet's sake. Critic Cyril Connolly has pointed out that in 63 poems Housman uses the word lad--a dubious word even in England--no less than 67 times. Oxford's Professor H. W. Garrod has objected to the "false-pastoral" quality of many of the poems, the frequent excessiveness of their emotions and situations. Poet Conrad Aiken, provoked by the overenthusiasm of an undergraduate, once described Housman as "a male Ella Wheeler Wilcox."/- Housman himself appreciated the parody of himself (by Hugh Kingsmill) which begins:

What! Still alive at twenty-two,

A dean, upstanding chap like you?

Permanent Adolescent. Housman seems essentially to have remained an adolescent, all of his 77 years. At their weakest, his emotions had the innocent, arrogant self-pity, the horribly magnanimous sentimentality, the incontinent irony, of which extreme youth is capable. At their best, they had the Roman stoicism and the Athenian sentience which are sometimes the glory of the very fine-souled when they are very young. In most of his verse their blend is irreducible, but it is fertilized by a minor yet miraculous poetic gift.

Housman's emotions were not only split between the great and the puerile; their range was remarkably narrow and primitive. His natural meter was quite as primitive--chiefly ballad stanzas (with some beautiful original variants on them), and the four-beat couplets which are the basic pulse of English poetry. But his subtle variety and mastery of tone, developed upon those few simple emotions and within that narrow range of key, are as remarkable as anything short of Mozart's minuets. Only the greatest poets had a better musical ear, a subtler handling of meter.

Housman could indulge in depths of unblushing self-pity; but he could also write the magnificent Be still, my soul, be still; the arms you bear are brittle. His gift for epigram and poetic conceit was too glib, but he could also write

. . . Malt does more than Milton can

To justify God's ways to man. He was almost as simple as the simplest of Wordsworth, but like Wordsworth he was capable of Miltonic splendor:

When Severn down to Buildwas ran

Coloured with the death of man. Such songs as On your midnight pallet lying and Bring, in this timeless grave to throw are, in perfection of tone, not far short of Shakespeare's Take, O, take those lips away and Fear no more the heat of the sun.

One quality Housman always lacked--the pure genius for simple, limber speech, untroubled by literature. But all that can be done by lyric inspiration under literary control he did in such a poem as:

Into my heart an air that kills

From yon far country blows:

What are those blue remembered hills,

What spires, what farms are those?

That is the land of lost content,

I see it shining plain,

The happy highways where I went

And cannot come again.

* A Shropshire Lad--with notes and a semicentennial bibliography by Carl J. Weber; $3; Colby College Library, Waterville, Me.

/- An American versifier, not to be confused with a female A. E. Housman.

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