A Reappraisal of Housman's Poems

ELT 36:3 1993 in 1929, and won praise for its wisdom, scholarship, and distinctive meter. The sale figures are astounding: in five months Oxford had printed more than 24,000 copies and had to replace the type. Bridges modestly credited a Times editorial mentioning his age, the work's dedication to the King, and its many cultural references. Less favorable responses turned on its remoteness from the horrors of modern history. But persistent idealism had not blinded Bridges to its darker realities. One of the last books he read before his death in 1930 was Goodbye to All That. He found Robert Graves's autobiography "disagreeable" but important because it would "set a lot of people thinking of the hell they live in." That was not, however, a suitable topic for the apostle of beauty. Martha S. Vogeler California State University, Fullerton A Reappraisal of Housman's Poems John Bayley. HoUSman's Poems. New York: Clarendon Press, 1992. 202 pp. $49.95 THIRTY-FIVE YEARS AGO John Bayley wrote in The Romantic Survival that A. E. Housman, despite his stoical attitude and classical form, was beneath it all a Romantic. In that earlier book Bayley mentioned Housman only in passing, his main subjects being Yeats and Auden and Dylan Thomas, but in this present book he concentrates exclusively on Housman, still regarding him as Romantic, as one whose poetry expresses what Keats called "the true voice of feeling." Another of Bayley's opinions from The Romantic Survival that has seemingly remained steadfast is his belief that modern academic criticism analyzes a poem as if it were a machine, ignoring the poem's vitality and spirit. Here he again challenges the Schools of English Literature, this time by defending Housman against the criticism of F. R. Leavis, in what is probably the best chapter of the book. In addition to protesting against those who "murder to dissect," Bayley attempts to show how Housman's poems meet the criterion of vitality, the symptom of which Housman had described in The Name and Nature of Poetry" as a shiver down the reader's spine. Thus, Bayley takes Housman on his own terms, a Romantic critic on a Romantic poet. This is the right approach, but unfortunately it goes awry. Perhaps the problem arises from the fact that a poem's vitality depends so much on an individual reader's personal response that it is difficult to share the response with others. In The Romantic Survival Bayley quoted Dr. 346 BOOK REVIEWS Johnson's definition of criticism as "a good service that one man does another when he tells him his manner of being pleased." In discussing the poetry of Housman, Bayley attempts to do us this good service, but his manner of being pleased is too idiosyncratic to be of much use. His manner of being pleased is the Romantic manner, which is to say the association of ideas, literary for the most part. When he reads one of Housman's poems, his mind begins associating words and ideas with those of other works he has read. When, for example, he discusses "An Epitaph," a six-line poem from Additional Poems, he refers to about fifteen different writers, from Keats (a favorite) to Paul Celan (another favorite), from Simonides to Theodor Adorno. Comparisons, to be sure, are common in criticism as a way of clarifying and enriching meaning. Occasionally they do here, as when Walter de la Mare's "Fare Well" is compared to Tell me not here" (Last Poems, XL) or when Hardy's "Drummer Hodge" is compared to "Astronomy" (Last Poems, XVII). In one instance, however, Bayley devotes an entire chapter to Paul Celan, an unwarranted amount of space in view of the limited benefit derived from the comparison. More frequently, though, the allusions are too subjective, too dependent upon a very individualistic response, to be shared intelligibly with others. Here is an example oÃ- what I mean, a short comment on a short poem. The poem is number VIII from Additional Poems: Now to her lap the incestuous earth The son she bore has ta'en. And other sons she brings to birth But not my friend again. And...