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One Twenty

Housman, Norton Anthology of Mod Poetry, 122-4

• Tried to distance himself from the other 90s poets (Dowson, Yeats)
  • Yet Yeatsian themes: rural areas, love, general disenchantment
• Admittedly infl by Heine (wistful), Hardy (doom)
• Common themes: society killed me!; mixture of youth, death, and frustrated love all in one fell swoop; nature’s meaningless fecundity
  • Thus used his poetry as outlet for feelings he couldn’t really engage in directly
• Other major vocation: editing classical texts
• Bio
  • Not from Shropshire, but near it
  • Dad from Lancashire, Mom from Cornwall
  • High Church upbringing
  • Oxford, performed poorly, met Moses Jackson (he’s passionate towards Jackson, who doesn’t respond like that, but does share rooms in London w/him, as just a friend)
  • Work in Patent Office
  • Jackson goes to India, comes back and marries, goes back to India, etc…
    • Housman gets more and more serious about classics
  • Got a chair in University College, London 1892
    • 1910: Elected to chair at Cambridge
  • 1894 – suicide of possibly homosexual cadet affects him deeply
  • 1896 A Shropshire Lad
  • 1922 Last Poems
  • 1933 “The Name and Nature of Poetry” @ Leslie Stephen
• Poetics
  • No such thing as a poetic idea, he thinks: you can express them in prose better
  • But that doesn’t matter b/c poetry not about the idea but really about emotion writer feels
    • Should be physical, not intellectual
  • 17th c poetry too mannered, 18th c too intellectual
    • Preferred lineage is Cowper, Collins, Smart, Blake: the passionate and intense ones
• Final opinion of the biographer: limited but memorable, camp but refined

Content

• The “wise man” has said to give away money, gems, but not the heart or the imagination
  • But he doesn’t heed this advice b/c he’s too young for people to talk to him seriously
• Because of this silence, he did give his heart away, and now he’s ruing it.

Form

• Two verses
• Each verse begins w/ “When I was one-and-twenty”
• Second lines are similar either heard the wise man say or say again
• The wise man is quoted in the four middle lines of the poem
• The final two poems relate the wise man’s words to his own personal situation
• Very balanced: Intro 2 lines; Content 4 lines; Conclusion 2 lines
• It is very similar to Yeats except Yeats’ feelings are more refined!