There's parodies from the likes of John Betjeman and Ezra Pound, though mostly he just seems to never be talked about anymore compared to contemporaries likes Yeats.
Housman once discussed the rememberance of sublime verse during such mundane acts as shaving. The combination of words would cause goosepimples, such sincerity is grand and superior to such hack representatives as Nabakov. My appreciations for sincerity ultimately leads me to be thankful that writers such as Thomas Pynchon are so popular. Irony can only work within a sincere framework.
Favourite poem by Housman:
On the idle hill of summer,
Sleepy with the flow of streams,
Far I hear the steady drummer
Drumming like a noise in dreams.
Far and near and low and louder
On the roads of earth go by,
Dear to friends and food for powder,
Soldiers marching, all to die.
East and west on fields forgotten
Bleach the bones of comrades slain,
Lovely lads and dead and rotten;
None that go return again.
Far the calling bugles hollo,
High the screaming fife replies,
Gay the files of scarlet follow:
Woman bore me, I will rise.
Victorian Poetry is excellent.
When I was one-and-twenty
I heard a wise man say,
“Give crowns and pounds and guineas
But not your heart away;
Give pearls away and rubies
But keep your fancy free.”
But I was one-and-twenty,
No use to talk to me.
When I was one-and-twenty
I heard him say again,
“The heart out of the bosom
Was never given in vain;
’Tis paid with sighs a plenty
And sold for endless rue.”
And I am two-and-twenty,
And oh, ’tis true, ’tis true.
And malt does more than Milton can
To justify God’s ways to man.
Ale, man, ale’s the stuff to drink
For fellows whom it hurts to think:
Look into the pewter pot
To see the world as the world’s not.
And faith, ’tis pleasant till ’tis past:
The mischief is that ’twill not last.
Oh I have been to Ludlow fair
And left my necktie God knows where, And carried half way home, or near,
Pints and quarts of Ludlow beer:
Then the world seemed none so bad,
And I myself a sterling lad;
And down in lovely muck I’ve lain,
Happy till I woke again.
Then I saw the morning sky:
Heigho, the tale was all a lie;
The world, it was the old world yet,
I was I, my things were wet, 40
And nothing now remained to do
But begin the game anew.
>>7638683
>The themes of his poetry and his emotional handling of them mark Housman as an extension of the romantic movement that flourished in England in the early part of the nineteenth century and had a resurgence in the aesthetic movement of the 1890s. The critical evaluation of Housman's work in the two decades after his death in 1936 is tinged with the anti-romanticism of the period. The directness and simplicity of much of Housman's poetry were viewed as faults. In A. E. Housman and W. B. Yeats Richard Aldington reported a rumor that circulated about Cambridge University to the effect that when influential critic I. A. Richards left Housman's Cambridge inaugural lecture he was heard to say: "This had put us back ten years." And Cyril Connolly, in a 1936 New Statesman article reprinted in Ricks's essay collection, said that Housman's poems "are of a triteness of technique equalled only by the banality of thought." He also talked about the limitations of the poet's themes of man's mortality and rebellion against his lot.
>>7638762
>No discussion of the quality of the verse.
>Mentions such loathsome Neo-Benthamites as Richards.
I find no group so disgusting as anti-romantics, the fact that such an attitude is rife these days depresses me.
>>7638770
I don't see how it's going to change anytime soon. Arts and criticism of the arts became a slog long before I, and probably you, were even born.
>>7638787
Yeah. I suppose we can be thankful that we have access to whatever literature we want to read.
>Life, to be sure,Is nothing much to lose,
>But young men think it is, And we were young.
is a good one-liner. I like the simplicity of his poems. Good rythm, sounds pretty. Probably there's few casuals left in poetry and academics a people that want to seem smarter than they are like think that aren't so easily accessible.
Lit is surprisingly lit today.
>>7638859
I have always loved the Victorian poets more than any others, and whenever they are brought up the very thought mellows me out.
