In my opinion, A.E. Housman's The Name and Nature of Poetry (Cambridge U. Press, 1933; also published by Macmillan in the U.S. the same year) ought to be as well regarded as Sir Philip Sidney's A Defence of Poetry, but it is a less well known book.
I just acquired a good used copy of the it; it was purchased in 1933 by its first owner--on September 20 of that year, if a note in pencil on the first page is to be believed. The brief book reprints Housman's Leslie Stephen Lecture at Cambridge on May 9, 1933, about three years before Housman's death. Housman was a professor of Latin at Cambridge for a long time.
Housman did not consider himself to be a literary critic. He writes (that is to say, he said), "In these twenty-two years [since last giving a lecture to a similar assembled body] I have improved in some respect and deteriorated in others; but I have not so much improved as to become a literary critic, nor so much deteriorated as to fancy that I have become one" (2). The well wrought prose and self-deprecation function as excellent rhetoric, establishing Housman's ethos and pretending to lower expectations.
He then states that he had first intended to talk about a subject that he believes can be approached with scientific certainty: "The Artifice of Versification." The topic appealed to him because he could approach it with such certainty, whereas trying to define poetry seemed a hopelessly murky enterprise. He thereby implies what he will later state: poetry is more than merely versifying. He then admits, "When one begins to discuss the nature of poetry, the first impediment in the way is the inherent vagueness of the name, and the number of its legitimate senses" (5). Although he admits what most of us admit when embarking on a definition of poetry--that poetry is almost impossible to define satisfactorily--he quickly gets down to cases, quoting two passages of poetry:
Now Gilpin had a pleasant wit
And loved a timely joke.
And thus unto the Callender
In merry guise he spoke.
I came because your horse would come;
And, if I well forbode,
My hat and wig will soon be here;
They are upon the road.
(This is from a poem by Cowper.)
Come, worthy Greek, Ulysses, come,
Possess these shores with me:
The winds and seas are troublesome,
And here we may be free.
Here may we sit and view their toil
That travail in the deep,
And joy the day in mirth the while,
And spend the night in sleep.
(This is from a poem by Samuel Daniel.)
Housman pronounces the first excerpt "capital"--as verse, but not as poetry. He pronounces the second poetry--and also calls it "perfect," adding, "and nothing more than perfection can be demanded of anything: yet poetry is capable of more than this, and more therefore is expected from it." So he thinks example two is good enough verse--verse with some substance--to be called poetry, and then he suggests that we ought to demand even more than perfection from poetry. No doubt Housman was aware that, by definition, more than perfection cannot be expected, but he was taking and we shall grant him poetic license, so to speak.
Housman thinks this next excerpt is even better (it is from a poem by Michael Bruce):
Sweet bird, thy bower is ever green,
Thy sky is ever clear;
Thou hast no sorrow in thy song,
No winter in thy year.
What Housman detects in this excerpt is the presence of emotion represented.
The excerpts were probably known to Housman's audience but not necessarily famous, and I like the fact that he chose excerpts that are unexpected, that aren't "ringers" of one kind or another. And Housman, is, it would seem, seriously trying to show us the relatively slight differences between and among mere verse, good verse, and verse that qualifies as good poetry.
The lecture then goes on to indict 18th century British poetry for being overwhelmed by the intellect to the exclusion of emotion and intuition. He writes,
"When I hear anyone say, with defiant emphasis, that [Alexander] Pope was a poet, I suspect him of calling in ambiguity of language to promote confusion of thought. That Pope was a poet is true; but it is one of those truths which are beloved of liars, because they serve so well the cause of falsehood. That Pope was not a poet is false; but a righteous man, standing in awe of the last judgment and the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone, might well prefer to say it" (30).
One of his points, I think, is that although Pope was a magnificent maker of verse--chiefly verse in heroic couplets--his poetry was too dominated by satiric impulses, dry intellect, and obsession with immediate politics and society to be what Housman might consider "real" poetry. He can't claim Pope was no poet. He can claim that, if I, for example, were forced to say who was the real poet--Alexander Pope or Emily Dickinson or A.E. Housman--I'd probably go with Dickinson and/or Housman every time--especially if the penalty for choosing incorrectly were to be tossed in that burning lake!
Housman then pushes the envelope and objects so strongly to the dominance of intellect in poetry that he claims that, for poetry, he prefers Blake at his best even when Blake is making no sense, simply because his poetry is so splendid. Hmmm. I think this comes close to a contradiction, because the first excerpt from Cowper was certainly pleasant verse--but not "real" poetry, and he just got through suggesting that the great technician Pope was suspect as a real poet. However, I also think Housman is contrasting Blake to Pope to reemphasize that Pope was tuned in chiefly to intellect and the artifice of versification, whereas Blake was tuned in to something more mysterious.
Housman does not go on to embrace 19th century British verse unthinkingly, and he claims that many people in the Victorian and Edwardian periods liked Wordsworth's poetry simply because of the philosophy (regarding nature) they believed it projected.
Then come three astonishing moments. First, on pages 45-46, Housman reports that someone from America wrote to him and asked him to define "poetry." Housman replied that "I could no more define poetry than a terrier can define a rat, but that I thought we both recognised the object by symptoms which it provokes in us." So, after the tour of specific excerpts and poets, Housman stands his ground and says that poetry is too hard to define but that he knows it when he sees it (as that Supreme Court justice knew pornography when he saw it even though he couldn't define "pornography" precisely).
Next, he calls poetry a "secretion." Now, Housman possessed a learned, alert, and ironic mind, so he was well aware of most if not all the smart-aleck remarks his serious claim might elicit. He had to have known he was taking a risk in telling the truth as he saw it, adding, "whether a natural secretion, like turpentine in the fir, or a morbid secretion, like the pearl in the oyster." He then says that, in his case, his poetry is more like the pearl than turpentine.
Finally, he describes his writing process (48): "Having drunk a pint of beer at luncheon--beer is a sedative to the brain, and my afternoons are the least intellectual portion of my life--I would go out for a walk of two or three hours. As I went along, thinking of nothing in particular, only looking at things around me and following the progress of the seasons, there would flow into my mind, with sudden and unaccountable emotion, sometimes a line or two of verse, sometimes a whole stanza at once, accompanied, not preceded, by a vague notion of a poem which they were destined to form part of."
A pint of beer, a long walk (away from purely intellectual pursuits), and an openness to or a readiness to listen for some lines and phrases: that was the Housman Way. (If I were to have read this when I was 20, I might have focused on the beer, exclusive of the two- or three-mile walk.) Fascinating.
In the book, Housman may protest too much against "the intellect" and its effect on poetry, for in addition to the strength of the verse itself and the emotion in his poetry, the ideas in his poetry appeal enormously to me and many others, and I suspect he liked ideas in poems as much as the next Latin professor, his claims about liking Blake's poetry (even when Blake made no sense) notwithstanding. Also, we might note that he circumvents any discussion of Whitman, the free-verse giant (he does mention one American--Poe) or of all the Modernist poetry that had arisen--erupted, if you will--in the decades just before 1933. He sticks with what he knows well: verse; "Old School" poetry. Since then, many readers, critics, and anthologists have asserted that free-verse poetry can be as beautiful as well written formal verse. But in this lecture, Housman sticks with poetry produced between the time of Shakespeare and the time of Matthew Arnold. Of Shakespeare, he writes that although (of course) Shakespeare was capable of producing great poetry, the poetry could be "confounded in a great river" (39) of ideas, observations, and conflict, whereas Blake's poetry could "be drunk pure from a slender channel of its own." I prefer almost all of Shakespeare's and Housman's poetry to almost all of Blake's--because I don't see the poetry as being confounded or made impure by other elements. For me, the other elements (ideas, rhetoric, irony) are poetic, when combined a certain way.
That is, I rather like the rhetoric and the argument in Sonnet 18, as well as the superb phrasing and the lovely meter and rhyme. In fact, the unabashed arrogance (although, if you can do it, it "ain't bragging") of Sonnet 18 is what makes it so winning for me--the argument being that the lover to and of whom he writes is destined to be immortal, after a fashion, because his poem will make her (probably "her") so.
Ah, but what a great read this little (50 pages) book is, and how wonderful to observe Housman taking a tour of poems and poets he considers just okay, good, and great. And to hear about how some of his poems first sprang to life (drinking beer, walking, musing) is warmly amusing and instructive.
In the book, Housman states that he is no critic and implies that he is more Latin scholar than poet, but now, of course, we view him as poet first, perhaps as critic second, and then (arguably) Latin scholar third. (Latin scholars may object.) Housman can't be happy about that, nor can he be entirely surprised. Those walks after his having downed a pint were simply too productive! Raise a glass and a poetic pen to A.E. In between the raisings, get some exercise!
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