Spartan

THE NAME AND NATURE OF POETRY-- A. E. Housman -- Macmillan ($1).

''How the world is managed, and why it was created, I cannot tell; but it is no featherbed for the repose of sluggards." More than one student of Latin verse, reading the preface to the best edition of Manilius, must have been surprised to find this sentence. Few professors of classics are capable of such utterance, but Alfred Edward Housman is no ordinary professor. British to the bone, classical to the core, in the never-numerous line of English scholar-poets he is the latest and perhaps the last. Thousands of readers know his two thin but unfragile volumes of poetry (A Shropshire Lad, Last Poems), and even Oxford dons have admitted that his place among English poets is already assured.

Professor Housman is unusual among poets: he does not consider himself one. With the publication of Last Poems (1922) he announced: "It is not likely that I shall ever be impelled to write much more. I can no longer expect to be revisited by the continuous excitement under which ... I wrote . . . nor indeed could I well sustain it if it came." He has had two rides on Pegasus; he wants no more. This abrupt reverence would be a rare phenomenon in any day. Anything Poet Housman had to say would carry authority to a multitude of readers. Few years ago, in answer to a U. S. request for a definition of poetry, he replied that he "could no more define poetry than a terrier can define a rat, but that I thought we both recognized the object by the symptoms which it provokes in us." Last month, before a Cambridge audience, he finally told the world what he thinks about poetry, how he wrote his own poems and what it felt like to write them. This lecture is now published in book form.

The highest poetry, Housman thinks, is not definable. No modern over-estimator of the 18th Century, he says: "When I hear anyone say, with defiant emphasis, that Pope was a poet, I suspect him of calling in ambiguity of language to promote confusion of thought." Most poetical of all poets, he thinks, was William Blake. As an example of "perfect poetry" he quotes a stanza from Samuel Daniel (1562-1619):

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. Though Housman considers poetry "more physical than intellectual," "the majority of mankind notoriously and indisputably do not . . . possess the organ by which poetry is perceived." But he himself, while shaving in the morning, has to watch his thoughts because, "if a line of poetry strays into my memory, my skin bristles so that the razor ceases to act."

Of his own poetry he says "I know how this stuff came into existence . . . and if I were obliged, not to define poetry, but to name the class of things to which it belongs, I should call it a secretion; whether a natural secretion, like turpentine in the fir, or a morbid secretion, like the pearl in the oyster. I think that my own case, though I may not deal with the material so cleverly as the oyster does, is the latter; because I have seldom written poetry unless I was rather out of health, and the experience, though pleasurable, was generally agitating and exhausting." After a pint of beer for lunch he would go for a long walk, "thinking of nothing in particular"; sometimes a line or two, sometimes a whole stanza would come into his mind. When he got home he would write down what had come to him, leaving the gaps to be filled by further bursts of inspiration: if none came he would turn to, hammer out the connections intellectually, laboriously.

The Author is almost a legendary figure even at Cambridge, where he has been Professor of Latin, Fellow of Trinity since 1911. Conventional, silent, learned, a recluse, he has made few and brief appearances in public. Around such academic figures there always spring up apocryphal tales. After a better-than-ordinary dinner Housman is reported to have made this speech: "Cambridge has seen some strange sights. It has seen the poet Wordsworth drunk, and the philosopher Person sober. Tonight it sees a better poet than Person and a better philosopher than Wordsworth, neither drunk nor sober, but just betwixt-and-between."

Housman laid the foundation of his classical learning at St. John's College, Oxford, then went to London as a Higher Division Clerk in the British Patent Office. After ten years in the Civil Service he became Professor of Latin at London's University College. His first book (A Shropshire Lad, 1896) brought him a reputation, but not the one he was after. While his younger brother Laurence was turning out a stream of second-rate novels and stories, A. E. Housman was making his name feared and respected among scholars as editor of Latin poets. His magnum opus, the editing of Manilius (4,258 lines) took him more than 30 years, was finally completed in 1930. As a scholar he is famed not only for his accuracy and arrogance but for his blasting criticisms of more slipshod predecessors who stood in his way; passages of his preface to Manilius are in more than one anthology of prose.

At the end of his lecture last month on The Name & Nature of Poetry in Cambridge's Senate-House, 74-year-old Scholar-Poet Housman said: "Farewell for ever. I will not say with Coleridge that I recentre my immortal mind in the deep sabbath of meek self-content; but I shall go back with relief and thankfulness to my proper job."

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