“Learning is a peculiar compound of memory, imagination, scientific habit, accurate observation, all concentrated, through a prolonged period, on the analysis of the remains of literature. The result of this sustained mental endeavour is not a book, but a man” Mark Pattison [1]
A. E. Housman was such a man. He had an acute and powerful mind, and he applied it throughout a long life to the criticism and interpretation of obscure classical texts. Not only his mind but his emotions seemed to be absorbed in this pursuit of truth; he lived a lonely life, and to the end of his days maintained a reserve which only a few chosen friends could penetrate – and which was not, perhaps, wholly penetrated even by them [1]. To the outside world he remained ‘a figure alarming, remote, mysterious’ [2].
A. E. Housman (1859-1936) was Professor of Latin at University College, London and at Cambridge. At his death in 1936 he was perhaps the most learned Latin scholar in the world [1].
His notion that poetry is not the thing said but a way of saying it, that it is more physical than intellectual [3]. In his lecture “The Name and Nature of Poetry” which Housman delivered in Cambridge in 1933, referred to the Artifice of Versification as a subject that belongs to the methodical mind-to “the man of science,” in fact, who would be “fitter for the task than most men of letters” [3]. Auden who wrote with deep sympathy and trenchancy about Housman, pointed out that no other English poet seemed so perfectly to express the sensibility of a male adolescent. He influenced very much the generation of Auden, and as Auden put it “I am eternally grateful to him for the joy he gave me in my youth” [3].
In this issue of the Journal, we have chosen a poem by Housman for his skills in reminding us of the five “C’s” mentioned in the Editorial: Communication, Competence, Continuity, Compassion and Circumspection.
Lili Maas Art & Advertising Director
REFERENCES
1 John Sparrow. Introduction. In: AE Housman. Collected Poems. London: Penguin Books; 1956. 2 ASF Gow. A. E. Housman A Sketch. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; 1936. 3 Brad Leithauser. A footnote for Housman. The New Criterion Vol. 10, No. 1, September 1991
