All Quotes

"The rainy Pleiads wester, Orion plunges prone, The stroke of midnight ceases, And I lie down alone."

"Who made the world I cannot tell; 'Tis made, and here am I in hell. My hand, though now my knuckles bleed, I never soiled with such a deed."

"Here dead we lie because we did not choose To live and shame the land from which we sprung. Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose; But young men think it is, and we were young."

"We now to peace and darkness And earth and thee restore Thy creature that thou madest And wilt cast forth no more."

"Good-night; ensured release, Imperishable peace, Have these for yours, While sea abides, and land, And earth's foundations stand, And heaven endures."

"I find Cambridge an asylum, in every sense of the word."

"In every American there is an air of incorrigible innocence, which seems to conceal a diabolical cunning."

"The emotional nature of his work fulfilled his own ideal. "I think that to transfuse emotion," he wrote in The Name and Nature of Poetry, "to set up in the reader's sense a vibration corresponding to what was felt by the writer—is the peculiar function of poetry." He judged it by the size of the lump it brought to his throat. It is in the light of his own statement that the verses of A Shropshire Lad should be considered. They are less the expression of profound experience than of common emotion intensely felt. The sad and bitter in life stirred him to write. The passing of time and time's revenges, injustice, fickleness of love, beauty's transience, and, over all, the shadow of death—with these he is preoccupied and from them his emotion springs... He cultivated the luxury of sadness, careful never to let it escape him, and he achieved neither more nor less than his ideal."

"Housman is one of my heroes and always has been. He was a detestable and miserable man. Arrogant, unspeakably lonely, cruel, and so on, but an absolutely marvellous minor poet, I think, and a great scholar."

"The way in which Housman's poetry has been published is marked throughout by his passion for distinction, his craving to be famous, his equally strong and perverse dislike of being known."

"Romantic poetry as Housman received it was in need of correction. He corrected it. The romantic conflict of man against society, of man against immutable laws is still there, but presented by a man who had the classic craftsman's respect both for himself and his craft. The form is concise and accurate; but for all their lightness, his poems never lose the sense of earth, for all their grace, they are tough enough to sustain a considerable irony. The limits within which Housman was able to feel at all were strict, but within them he felt intensely, and both strictness and intensity are in his verse."

"At the beginning of the period I am speaking of, the years during and immediately after the war, the writer who had the deepest hold upon the thinking young was almost certainly Housman. Among people who were adolescent in the years 1910–25, Housman had an influence which was enormous and is now not at all easy to understand. In 1920, when I was about seventeen, I probably knew the whole of the Shropshire Lad by heart... these are the poems that I and my contemporaries used to recite to ourselves, over and over, in a kind of ecstasy."

"I took Housman for a walk and asked him how he had come to write his early verses and whether there was any episode in his life which suggested their gruesome character, but he assured me it was not so. He had lived as a boy in Worcestershire, not in Shropshire, though within sight of the Shropshire hills, and there was nothing gruesome to record. He shows no trace now of anything romantic, being a typical Cambridge Don, prim in his manner, silent and rather shy, conventional in dress and manner, learned, accurate, and well-informed. He is professor there of Latin, talking fairly well, but not brilliantly or with any originality, depressed in tone, and difficult to rouse to any strong expression of opinion... I have a great admiration for his ‘Shropshire Lad,’ on account of its ballad qualities and the wonderful certainty in his choice of exactly the right word. We had much pleasant talk all day, and sat up again till twelve at night telling ghost stories. He takes an interest in these. Housman's personal appearance is one of depression and indifferent health. He does not smoke, drinks little, and would, I think, be quite silent if he were allowed to be."

"A. E. Housman was the greatest Latinist of his age. He excelled at editing difficult Latin texts, which called for the highest degree of knowledge and judgement... Housman was, as A. C. Clark said, "daemonic", and whatever he touched revealed his extraordinary mastery. He was a perfectionist and expected other scholars to maintain the same very high standards as himself."

"His underlip hinted at ferocity, and nothing hinted that he was the author of A Shropshire Lad. I heard him read a paper on "Prosody and Method" to the Oxford Philological Society. It was a masterly performance and annihilated some modern errors about Latin metric."

"There are two themes in Housman, man's mortality, which intensifies for him the beauty of nature, and man's rebellion against his lot. On his treatment of these themes his reputation for classicism subsists. But his presentation of both is hopelessly romantic and sentimental, the sentiment of his poems in fact is that of Omar Khayyam, which perhaps accounts for their popularity; he takes over the pagan concept of death and oblivion as the natural end of life and even as a not inappropriate end of youth, and lards it with a purely Christian self-pity, and a romantic indulgence in the pathetic fallacy."

"The fate which Housman's poems deserve, of course, is to be set to music by English composers and sung by English singers, and it has already overtaken them. He will live as long as the B.B.C. does."

"My father gave me A Shropshire Lad by A. E. Housman on my 19th birthday (Housman's birthday too, as it happens). I had never visited Shropshire then, but nor had Housman when he wrote the poems so why should it stop me enjoying them? I think it was A Shropshire Lad that first taught me the hypnotic power of words."

"It was not that Housman did not understand the profound emotional content of poetry, and Horace's exquisite ode; he understood and felt it all too keenly. But his own emotional economy was subject to strict, self-imposed constraints. A poet of a later generation, W. H. Auden, also homosexual, attempted to psychoanalyze Housman's retreat from unbearable or unacceptable emotion—his love of rough trade—into a dry scholarship that was a form of self-hate, into which he could at least channel the emotions of cold anger and contempt. Housman, in what you could see as an act of self-punishment, chose to devote many years to an edition not of Horace or Propertius, the poets he really loved, but of Manilius, a minor Roman versifier whose long didactic poem on astrology must rank as one of the most obscure in the entire annals of poetry."

"In later years Housman liked to attribute the "morbid secretion" of poetry to illness, but it seems to have been a state of guilt that brought his poems into existence. His father's death revived long-suppressed conflicts between parental duty and the annihilating force of his "nameless and abominable" love. A catalyst in this process...may well have been the Oscar Wilde trial, which must have demonstrated to Housman's painfully conformist mind just how ruthlessly "the laws of God, the laws of man" were interpreted and enforced in Victorian England."

"In his last year at Oxford Housman shared lodgings with two friends, A. W. Pollard and Moses Jackson. Jackson was a brilliant scientist, certain of a First, tall, well-built, handsome and self-confident. Housman, short, shy and undistinguished in appearance, worshiped him. Too clear-headed and honest to deceive himself about the nature of this absorption, he was also too well trained in conventional morality to accept it with resignation. The evidence of his poetry suggests that he was overwhelmed with shame. His Christian faith had gone at the age of thirteen, when he became a deist; by twenty-one he was an atheist. At heart he defied the world; but outwardly, circumstances and a naturally conformist temper of mind preserved an appearance of rigid propriety. He hid his emotions and for the rest of his life felt the bitterness of the frustration."

"When passing through Berlin in the summer of 1926 I had the privilege of spending an interesting afternoon with the late Professor Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff at his house in Charlottenburg. I remember that we were discussing the various ways of pronouncing Homer, when he suddenly remarked, "Although we Germans know Housman to be a rabid Germanophobe, we, nevertheless, unanimously pronounce him to be the greatest living authority on both Latin and Greek in the English-speaking world. His latest work is above praise." Professor Wilamowitz-Moellendorff was not aware until afterwards that he was addressing these words to an old pupil, and also an old friend, of Professor Housman."

"He published about 235 articles and edited Lucan, Juvenal, and five volumes of Manilius between 1903 and 1930. Widely acknowledged as the greatest scholar of his age, he could justly claim with Horace: Exegi monumentum aere perennius (I have built a monument more lasting than bronze)."

"A. E. Housman I can always read, in spite of his detestable philosophy."

"Housman is a "country" poet. His poems are full of the charm of buried villages, the nostalgia of place-names, Clunton and Clunbury, Knighton, Ludlow, "on Wenlock Edge", "in summer time on Bredon", thatched roofs and the jingle of smithies, the wild jonquils in the pastures, the "blue, remembered hills"."

"Again as with a bullfight, you never appreciate this sport till you see a really great performer. Something departed for ever from the pleasure of specialist review reading when A. E. Housman gibbeted his last victim."

"The exhilaration was produced by watching what seemed to be a mental machine of great power and precision applied to material at first sight unexpected... The severity of Housman's presentation was the severity not of passionlessness but of suppressed passion, passion for true poetry and passion for truthfulness. For Housman textual criticism was the exercise of moral self-discipline... The phrases remembered over the years flashed from the inner furnace of passion for truth and logical thought, and of indignation against every interest or influence which could corrupt it... Under the radiation of this display of a great critical mind in action, one's own powers, such as they might be, developed – above all, the spirit of bold but temperate self-reliance without which no criticism is possible."

"One morning in May, 1914, when the trees in Cambridge were covered with blossom, he reached in his lecture Ode 7 in Horace's Fourth book, "Diffugere nives, redeunt iam gramina campis." This ode he dissected with the usual display of brilliance, wit, and sarcasm. Then for the first time in two years he looked up at us, and in quite a different voice said: "I should like to spend the last few minutes considering this ode simply as poetry." Our previous experience of Professor Housman would have made us sure that he would regard such a proceeding as beneath contempt. He read the ode aloud with deep emotion, first in Latin and then in an English translation of his own. "That," he said hurriedly, almost like a man betraying a secret, "I regard as the most beautiful poem in ancient literature," and walked quickly out of the room. A scholar of Trinity (since killed in the War), who walked with me to our next lecture, expressed in undergraduate style our feeling that we had seen something not really meant for us. "I felt quite uncomfortable," he said. "I was afraid the old fellow was going to cry.""

"May I lay stress on the nobility and humanity of Housman's character? I have known many poets great and small...but I have known no poet and no scholar—and, indeed, no man—who impressed me as so great and human a being as Housman did... He was great and yet he was not chill; he was noble and yet he could unbend. I, who have travelled with him for weeks together, saw, and felt, now and again, an impatience with fools, and yet there went always with it some understanding of, and sympathy with, folly. He was always tolerant, greatly tolerant. He could understand the weaknesses of others. A great man, yes."

"As a classical scholar Housman was, beyond serious dispute, among the greatest of all time. Not the greatest, certainly: of Bentley's superiority in their common field of textual criticism he was himself intolerantly convinced. And he would never have denied that Mommsen and Wilamowitz were cast in a larger mould. He published much; but the measure of his scholarship, as of his verse, was narrow. Apart from some early work on Greek tragedy, he devoted himself almost exclusively to the text and interpretation (I use the latter word in its restricted sense) of classical Latin poets. He says of his commentary on the astrologer poet Manilius, his magnum opus, that it is designed to treat of two matters only: what Manilius wrote and what he meant. And almost everything that Housman published on classical authors—the editions of Juvenal and Lucan, as well as the mass of articles in learned journals—might be similarly described."

"When I ask myself what it is that has made my readings of the Manilius the most memorable intellectual experience of my life, I look to another quality, which I find in no other comparable scholar to anything like the same degree. I mean Housman's unremitting, passionate zeal to see each one of the innumerable problems in his text not as others had presented it or as he might have preferred it to appear but exactly as it was."

"Housman was a marvel of learning and brilliancy and penetration: and he had, or came to have, the prime virtue; which is to say that he clung to reality, abhorring from the bottom of his soul all efforts to fit it upon frames or smother it in cotton wool. Reality, in philology as elsewhere, is often inconvenient. So much the worse: "They say my verse is sad"."

"His saeva indignatio was nearly always reserved for pretentious incompetence, intellectual fraud, meanness of spirit, and that compound of the three which makes men band together, with cries of mutual encouragement, round a fashionable totem. Against these things Housman waged war, without respect of persons or enmity towards them."

"No one when he reads...the pieces which begin "There pass the careless people" and "If truth in hearts that perish" can doubt that they were inspired by actual experience of the passion of love. But Housman did not often express these feelings directly in his published poems. A clerk in the Patent Office, even a Professor in Cambridge, could not confess to affections of which a poet could speak only in ancient Greece. Like Gray, therefore, and for the same reason, Housman "never spoke out". For the most part, he held his peace – "Ask me no more, for fear I might reply"."

"As the creator of "A Shropshire Lad" he was well known and admired wherever English poetry is read; while among classical scholars the Professor of Latin at Cambridge had earned for himself a place among the greatest editors and critics in the long history of classical scholarship. Surprising as it may seem to those of his readers who know only his poetry, his attainments in scholarship were higher than they were in poetry."

"The Shropshire of Housman's imagination is at once curiously realistic and romantic—a land of faerie yet of solid earth, somewhat like that depicted on the shield of Achilles in the Iliad. A beautiful world is set as a magic stage for the course of human wilfulness, perversity, and tragic fate. A strong vein of what many would call pessimism runs through the whole: these "lads," these soldiers and other companions of the poet, are pitted against destiny on an earthly stage of ironical enchantment under the cope of mathematically ordered cosmic processes."

"Philip was the unsettling definition of a full-on alpha male: devastatingly handsome, vigorously self-assured, impatient with fools — and not just fools. When he leaned from his considerable height and bore down on a recalcitrant fact or factotum, it could be a shriveling experience for whoever had got it wrong."

"Is this the spectacle of a great mind crippled? Certainly it is the spectacle of a mind of remarkable penetration and vigour, of uncommon sensibility and intensity, condemning itself to duties which prevent it from rising to its full height. Perhaps it is the case of a man of genius who has never been allowed to come to growth. Housman's anger is tragic like Swift's. He is perhaps more pitiable than Swift, because he has been compelled to suppress himself more completely. Even when Swift had been exiled to Ireland, he was able to take out his fury in crusading against the English. But A. E. Housman, giving up Greek in order to specialize in Latin because he "could not attain to excellence in both," giving up Propertius, who wrote about love, for Manilius, who did not even deal with human beings, turning away from the lives of the Romans to rivet his attention to the difficulties of their texts, can only flatten out small German professors with weapons which would have found fit employment in the hands of a great reformer or a great satirist. He is the hero of The Grammarian's Funeral—the man of learning who makes himself impressive through the magnitude, not the importance, of his achievement. After all, there was no need for another Bentley."

"When a man opens a car door for his wife, it's either a new car or a new wife."

"You have mosquitoes. I have the Press."

"British women can't cook."

"I declare this thing open, whatever it is."

"The man who invented the red carpet needed his head examined."

"It seems to me that it's the best way of wasting money that I know of. I don't think investments on the moon pay a very high dividend."

"Education, journalism, technology, entertainment and business may also find better methods for their purpose than books and writing. But this does not mean that tapes and films have made books obsolescent—the contention is almost too ludicrous to be taken seriously. Books are certainly old fashioned, but only people with a very limited perception are silly enough to condemn ideas because of their age. It is, of course, equally silly to condemn the new fangled simply because it is strange, and I am full of admiration for the technologists who have developed all sorts of gadgets for the purpose of improving communications. However, I believe that all these fascinating machines are complementary to, and not substitutes for, books and the printed word."

"For conservation to be successful it is necessary to take into consideration that it is a characteristic of man that he can only be relied upon to do anything consistently which is in his own interest. He may have occasional fits of conscience and moral rectitude but otherwise his actions are governed by self-interest. It follows then that whatever the moral reasons for conservation it will only be achieved by the inducement of profit or pleasure."

"The conflict between instinct and reason has reached a critical stage in man's affairs, largely because the explosion of facts has revealed the instincts for what they are and at the same time it has undermined traditional philosophies and ideologies. The explosion of facts has effectively altered mankind's physical and intellectual environment and when any environment changes, the process of natural selection is brutal and merciless. «Adapt or die» is as true today as it was in the beginning."

"Why then be concerned about the conservation of wildlife when for all practical purposes we would be much better off if humans and their domestic animals and pets were the only living creatures on the face of the earth? There is no obvious and demolishing answer to this rather doubtful logic although in practice the destruction of all wild animals would certainly bring devastating changes to our existence on this planet as we know it today...The trouble is that everything in nature is completely interdependent. Tinker with one part of it and the repercussions ripple out in all directions... Wildlife — and that includes everything from microbes to blue whales and from a fungus to a redwood tree — has been so much part of life on the earth that we are inclined to take its continued existence for granted...Yet the wildlife of the world is disappearing, not because of a malicious and deliberate policy of slaughter and extermination, but simply because of a general and widespread ignorance and neglect."

"We talk about over- and underdeveloped countries; I think a more exact division might be between underdeveloped and overpopulated. The more people there are, the more industry and more waste and the more sewage there is, and therefore the more pollution."

"It is curious how many philosophers from Plato to Keynes' time have believed in and advocated the control of society by "philosopher kings". According to Plato, "its kings must be those who have shown the greatest ability in philosophy", but--realistically--he added, "and the greatest aptitude for war". Such people may exist in the imagination and occasionally someone with the necessary qualities may briefly dominate the stage of history, but it is a naive appreciation of human nature to imagine that such processed paragons can be invested with the necessary powers and not be tempted to take advantage of their situation."