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I've only read a few of these, including the famous "Easter Hymn," and even though the expression is flowery and "poetic" in the traditional sense (Housman was a scholar of Swinburne, among others) and much mention is made of religious themes, there's a certain not-so-hidden edge and anger and disillusionment in these poems -- a questioning of divine mercy. Good stuff.
I don't really have a good way to read or judge poetry. It was certainly harder to read on the bus than prose, because I re-read most of them to get the sense of the language. But I enjoyed them. The one about the Westerly Pleiades I particularly liked the first version of. The library copy I read had a couple of bizarre notes in the margins, including a verse of a Willie Nelson song (and a library card with 1978 stamped on it). I'm not sure it's very popular, which is a shame.
Stars, I have seen them fall, But when they drop and dieNo star is lost at all From all the star-sown sky.The toil of all that be Helps not the primal fault;It rains into the sea, And still the sea is salt.
Okay, I try with poetry. I want to like it vastly more than I do. And apparently, I like poetry that is more florid as opposed to laconic or rhyming. A.E. Housman did A Shropshire Lad and his dates are like 1800s until 1936. This book is collected after his death by his brother. I get the feeling that he’s very traditional. And he is a Latin scholar. And there’s like repressed homosexuality cause of his age. Supposedly. So, like meh. I like his word choiceage and some of his rhymes are nice. The...
I think it’s the state of the world right now, but these didn’t speak to me the way I expected. Some gorgeous gems of poetry, but sometimes dire and sad.
Popsugar 2020: The first book you touched with your eyes closed.
Moved to gwern.net.
Came because of Endeavour. Stayed for A. E. Housman.
As a piece of publishing I love this edition of these poems - or perhaps it is just the one I have, with rough-cut pages and uneven alignment but within a firm board and cloth cover. In some ways that epitomizes what is inside, a posthumous anthology of unpublished and largely unfinished poems published by the poet's brother Laurence. Many other pieces were apparently destroyed on the author's instructions as being unfinished or sub-standard, but I suspect some of these would also have fallen fo...
Of course one of my all-time favorite books would read like a classicist's torch song.