"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."
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Atheists from EnglandEssayists from EnglandPoets from EnglandUniversity of Cambridge facultyCritics from the United Kingdom
Original Language: English
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D. R. Shackleton Bailey, 'A. E. Housman as a Classical Scholar', The Listener, Vol. LXI, No. 1571 (7 May 1959), p. 795
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/A._E._Housman
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A. E. Housman
Alfred Edward Housman (26 March 1859 – 30 April 1936), usually known as A.E. Housman, was an English poet and classical scholar, now best known for his cycle of poems '.
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