I first heard of Alan Bennett when he was one of the quartet of wits (Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Jonathan Miller) who made up Beyond the Fringe. Only later I learned of his renown as a playwright. In 2014, Faber & Faber published a book of his called Six Poets: Hardy to Larkin, An Anthology. Bennett's six poets are Thomas Hardy, A. E. Housman, John Betjeman, W. H. Auden, Louis MacNeice and Philip Larkin. It was clearly a personal selection, rather idiosyncratic, and limited to Brits, and not trying to be scholarly or comprehensive or even prescriptive.
While it's tempting to quibble with Bennett's choices (Louis MacNeice?), if I were to compile such an anthology, I would keep two of his poets (Hardy and Larkin) and add four of my own choosing: Robert Frost, Robert Graves, Wallace Stevens, and Elizabeth Bishop. I will devote a piece to each of them in the coming weeks.
Randall Jarrell claimed that poets are people who run outdoors during thunderstorms hoping to get hit by lightning. If they are struck a few times in their lives they are genuine poets. If they are struck several times they are great. Everyone interested in poetry has his or her own way of telling the real thing from the fake. Housman told a friend that he couldn't think of a poem while he was shaving because it made his whiskers stand on end and he couldn't get a good shave. Some invoke the hairs on their forearms or on the back of their necks standing edgewise. It is always something like this - an uncanny feeling, like terror, comes over you. Robert Graves went so far as to identify it as the unmistakable presence of his White Goddess.
1. Thomas Hardy (2 June 1840 – 11 January 1928)
Though he studied to be an architect, Thomas Hardy was a lifelong poet. He even dictated a poem to his second wife from his deathbed. He wrote novels to make a living, but he didn't publish his first book of poems, Wessex Poems and Other Verses, until 1898, after the outraged reception of his last two novels, Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure made him decide to give up novel writing altogether. He was clearly in the habit of writing poetry, of finding occasions to put thoughts and feelings down in verse. That he maintained, over more than sixty years of writing poems, such a high degree of quality is amazing in itself.
But it is commonly believed that his work took on a higher quality and a greater sense urgency upon the death of his first wife, Emma. He then wrote, in Poems of 1912-13, a series of poems that are imbued with a powerful grief and regret. His marriage to Emma, which lasted thirty-eight years, was marked by an estrangement before her death, which caused Hardy greater pain when he looked back on the course of his love for her. Here is a poem from that period.
THE VOICE
Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me,
Saying that now you are not as you were
When you had changed from the one who was all to me
But as at first, when our day was fair.
Can it be you that I hear?
Let me view you, then,
Standing as when I drew near to the town
Where you would wait for me: yes, as I knew you then,
Even to the original air-blue gown!
Or is it only the breeze, in its listlessness
Travelling across the wet mead to me here,
You being ever dissolved to wan wistlessness,
Heard no more again far or near?
Thus I; faltering forward,
Leaves around me falling,
Wind oozing thin through the thorn from norward,
And the woman calling.
December 1912.
Hardy isn't telling us a ghost story, as in Wuthering Heights. He is haunted by thoughts of his wife, that make him feel her presence, but he is writing about the dead. He feels that her death is a direct challenge to his continued existence. Emma's death was not Hardy's first encounter with death, but it made him think about his own death for the first time, which hers seemed to directly foretell. In several poems, Hardy is reminded, again and again, that his place is with her in the grave. In another poem from the period, "Something Tapped," Hardy hears a tapping at the window and thinks that he sees "my weary Belovèd's face," berating him that she has waited in vain for so long for him to join her in the grave. Some have mistaken this concentration on death as "gothic" - a term that Hardy knew from his studies in English architecture, not as a popular genre of horror fiction. Again, Hardy wrote of someone he knew who had died and with whose absence he was obsessed. But unlike Miss Kenton in Henry James's The Turn of the Screw, we never have to guess whether someone is seeing ghosts or is merely hallucinating. Emma is unambiguously dead. The voice that Hardy hears, the visions he sees, the presence he feels, are all in his mind - and he cannot get them out.
There is a haiku by the 17th century poet Basho that captures the same tone:
The piercing chill I feel/ my dead wife’s comb, in our bedroom/ under my heel
There is the physical pain of the comb's "teeth" digging into his foot, and the existential pain of the sudden remembrance of his wife.
Hardy's plans to join Emma after his death were frustrated by well-meaning people who wanted to secure his legacy. He had left instructions that his body should be placed beside Emma in Stinsford churchyard where she was buried. However, his executor insisted that Hardy be buried in Westminster Abbey's Poet's Corner. A compromise was reached whereby Hardy's heart was removed from his body prior to cremation. The heart was buried with Emma, and his ashes enshrined in Westminster. While somewhat poetic, I somehow doubt that Hardy would've been satisfied with his executor's solution.
I read somewhere that A. E. Housman, Oxford scholar and author of the stubbornly popular poem cycle A Shropshire Lad, was a pallbearer at the funeral of Thomas Hardy. While there is plenty of reason why Housman should be a prominent player in the ceremony, I wonder if the anecdote is apocryphal, since Housman was 68 when Hardy died, and Oxford dons aren't known for their physical fitness.
It is now 82 years since Housman's death, since his being eulogized as the greatest elegist since Gray, and since the inevitable reaction against such fulsome praise - Cyril Connolly's critical attack on his poetry, Edmund Wilson's devastating demolition of his character (based on his life's work as a scholar of Latin), and a poem by W. H. Auden (which he later suppressed):
A.E.Housman
No one, not even Cambridge was to blame
(Blame if you like the human situation):
Heart-injured in North London, he became
The Latin Scholar of his generation.
Deliberately he chose the dry-as-dust,
Kept tears like dirty postcards in a drawer;
Food was his public love, his private lust
Something to do with violence and the poor.
In savage foot-notes on unjust editions
He timidly attacked the life he led,
And put the money of his feelings on
The uncritical relations of the dead,
Where only geographical divisions
Parted the coarse hanged soldier from the don.(1)
Connolly may have provided a much-needed correction of Housman's overblown reputation ["(in A Shropshire Lad) the word 'lad' (one of the most vapid in the language) occurs sixty-seven times in sixty-three poems"], and Wilson, who only wanted to discover something new about Housman, gave us a window through which Housman's extreme professional jealousy - or zealotry - became clear. As for Auden, who perhaps might have been relied on to express some sympathy for Housman's extreme emotional limitations, the great wall he built around his love's grave, he knew well enough by then (1936) that real poetry could never enjoy as much popularity as A Shropshire Lad enjoyed. There must have been another reason for Housman's fame.
What was it? In his essay, "Inside the Whale," George Orwell noted that "Housman's poems had not attracted much notice when they were first published. What was there in them that appealed so deeply to a single generation, the generation born around 1900?" Orwell identified the deep nostalgia of a newly urbanized people for "country matters" and for rustic folk in much closer contact with the elements and the elemental nature of life.
But he also noticed that "all his themes are adolescent - murder, suicide, unhappy love, early death. They deal with the simple, intelligible disasters that give you the feeling of being up against the 'bedrock facts' of life." The power of Housman's poetry derives from its severe limitations. No matter where you open a volume of his poems, whether it's A Shropshire Lad (1896), Last Poems (1922), or indeed the posthumous More Poems (1936) and Collected Poems (1939), "It is all more or less in the same tune."
Edmund Wilson got more personal. Limiting his analysis to Housman's classical scholarship, whose life's work was the editing and annotating of the extant works of Manilius, the Astronomicon in five volumes, a Roman author whom Housman himself believed was, according to his colleague and earliest biographer A. S. F. Gow, "a facile and frivolous poet",(2) Wilson concluded that "It was a queer destiny, and one that cramped him - if one should not say rather that he had cramped himself.... There is an element of perversity, of self-mortification, in Housman's career all along.... Housman is closed from the beginning. His world has no opening horizons; it is a prison that one can only endure. One can only come the same painful cropper over and over again and draw from it the same bitter moral.... And Housman has managed to grow old without in a sense ever knowing maturity." Grouping him with the "monastic order of English acetics, Walter Pater and Lewis Carroll, Wilson comes closest to Housman's problem without actually naming it: "Alice and the Shropshire Lad and Marius the Epucurean are all beings of a looking-glass world, either sexless or with an unreal sex which turns only toward itself in the mirror of art."
Yet Wilson was moved sufficiently by Housman's fate to write a paragraph that glows with brilliant insight and emotion:
"It is only in the Latin verses - said to have been called by Murray the best since the ancient world - which Housman prefixed to his Manilius, in his few translations from Latin and Greek, and in his occasional literary essays, that the voice of the Shropshire Lad comes through - that voice which, once sped on its way, so quickly pierced the hearts and the minds of the whole English-speaking world and which went in vibrating for decades, disburdening hearts with its music that made loss and death and disgrace seem so beautiful, while poor Housman, burdened sorely forever, sat grinding and snarling at his texts. Would he have called back that voice if he could, as he recalled, or tried to recall, so much else? There are moments when his ill humour and his pedantry, his humility which is a perverse kind of pride, almost makes us think that he would."(3)
All of this suggests that Housman as a poet is a "special case" and undeserving of his fame. But, as Orwell suggested, "There is no need to under-rate him now because he was over-rated a few years ago. Although one gets into trouble nowadays for saying so, there are a number of his poems ('Into my heart an air that kills', for instance, and 'Is my team ploughing?') that are not likely to remain long out of favour." Within his limits, Housman remains a fine - minor - poet.
I'm not sure if close textual analyses as that commonly practiced today would have disclosed the nature of Housman's great "fault" or if it could've been inferred from certain individual poems. A. E. Housman's brother Laurence was entrusted by him with his literary remains, among which was a diary that he'd kept when he was a student at Oxford in 1888-1891. Out of fear, perhaps, that it would tarnish his brother's reputation (which he had so scrupulously cultivated), in a move that now seems incredibly - almost calculatedly - prescient, in 1942 Laurence Housman handed a sealed packet containing the diary along with a 20-page essay in Laurence's handwriting titled "A. E. Housman's 'De Amicitia'", over "to Trustees of the British Museum with the stipulation that it was to remain unopened for twenty-five years."(4) True to the terms of their trusteeship, the packet was unsealed in 1967 and its contents turned over to Jonathan Cape, Housman's publisher. Laurence Housman's essay was published in the magazine Encounter.
Laurence Housman's essay explicitly discusses A. E.'s feelings for a man, a Canadian, named Moses Jackson,[see photo] whom he had first met at Oxford in 1877 at the age of eighteen. They became close friends and remained so even after leaving Oxford and working in the Patent Office together until 1887. But A. E. had fallen in love with Jackson, a love that Jackson could neither accept nor return. "Around 1885," according to Laurence, A. E. and Jackson had a falling out and A. E. went what we would call "off the radar" for an entire week. No explanation was made for the disappearance, and it was never mentioned again. Jackson departed England to work in India at the end of 1887. In his diary of the period, A. E. tracks the progress of Jackson's ship all the way to its destination. Jackson didn't return to England until October 1889. His purpose for returning wasn't divulged to A. E. until afterward, when he was informed that Jackson had been married. Jackson and his bride departed for India without A. E. ever meeting him. They met for the last time on May 22, 1891.
A Shropshire Lad was published in 1896. Although Housman continued to write poems, it wasn't until 1922, when he learned that Moses Jackson was dying in British Columbia that he submitted Last Poems for publication and he inscribed a copy and had it sent to Jackson's family. Jackson died the following year. However much Housman's sexuality was a secret to the general public, some of his poems that had something closer to autobiographical content suggested as much on close reading. Housman left these poems for his brother to publish after his death.
Et ce fût tout. Moses Jackson doesn't explain Housman's sad life, but Philip Larkin, who called Housman "the poet of unhappiness," said of him that "no one else has reiterated his single message so plangently." Reviewing a biography of Housman in 1979,(5) Larkin closes with a curious paragraph:
“To be more unhappy than unfortunate suggests some jamming of the emotions whereby they are forced to re-enact the same situation even though it no longer exists, but for Housman it did still exist. If unhappiness was the key to poetry , the key to unhappiness was Moses Jackson. It would be tempting to call this neurosis, but there is a shorter word. For as Housman himself said, anyone who thinks he has loved more than one person has simply never really loved at all.”
Larkin was probably telling more about himself than he wished to, but he was saying what he knew about love, and at a point in his life (only a few years before his own death) when he was certain that it was true.
(1) Ironically, what is today probably Auden's most popular poem, "Stop all the clocks," is quite Housmanesque.
(2) Laurence Housman included in Additional Poems, an inscription "written by A.E.H on the flyleaf of a copy of Manilius, Book I, which he gave to Walter Headlam":
Here are the skies, the planets seven,
And all the starry train;
Content you with the mimic heaven,
And on the earth remain.
(3) Edmund Wilson, The Triple Thinkers: Twelve Essays on Literary Subjects (London: John Lehman, 1952).
(4) Sixteen days after the publication of Laurence Housman's essay, on July 27, 1967, homosexuality was decriminalized in Britain under the Sexual Offences Act .
(5) Richard Perceval Graves, A. E. Housman: The Scholar-Poet (London: Oxford University Press, 1979).
