I’m not, so to speak, well-versed on poetry criticism, so I’m probably not treading any new ground here (in fact, WRB joked about Housman a couple of weeks ago). But, having finished A.E. Housman’s A Shropshire Lad, I can see why he’s considered among the middling English poets.
He certainly can at times write a striking image. He effectively evokes the depth of history everywhere in Europe. See “Then ‘twas the Roman, now ‘tis I… / To-day the Roman and his trouble / Are ashes under Uricon.” Or the hearkening back to the Saxon conquest in The Welsh Marshes.
And I admire his local patriotism. A person really ought to love the place they’re from, with all its good and bad, as Housman demonstrably loves Shropshire. “You and I must keep from shame / In London streets the Shropshire name” is what we all ought to think of our hometowns when we’re about in the world.
But that patriotism can carry too far, when he seems sometimes to drift into an Englsh imperial jingoism. Some of his war poetry reads as ironic, or at least facetious. “Stand and fight and see your slain / And take the bullet in your brain” isn’t going to appear on recruiting posters any time soon. But then there are verses like this from The New Mistress, which are hard to read as anything other than glorying in battle:
I will go where I am wanted, where there’s room for one or two,
And the men are none too many for the work there is to do;
Where the standing line wears thinner and the dropping dead lie thick;
And the enemies of England they shall see me and be sick.
I think this recurring war theme is less about the historical details of who was fighting whom and for what, and more a result of his morbid obsession with death. Dying in battle, dying by hanging, dying of disease, dying at the hands of a knife-wielding murderer. He’s less concerned with the manner of death than with that fact that someone’s got to die. The constant drumming on about death becomes predictable by the time you’re about ten poems into the collection. I assumed, given this constant theme, he was among the war poets of WWI, but in fact this collection was written a full generation before. Who was England fighting in 1896? The Mahdi? The Boers? Hardly glorious battle against existential threats to his beloved homeland. You start to imagine his friends tentatively checking in on him to see if he was doing alright and assure themselves he wasn’t on the verge of offing himself. It begins to feel almost juvenile, a grown man working a dull office job by day, but a high school goth at heart.
Speaking of drumming on, Housman is nearly flawless as a technical writer of verse. His syllables and stresses line up perfectly, almost stiffly, themselves like a band of red-coated soldiers on the march. You almost want him to slip a beat here and there, introduce a bit of variety. A little jazz in the midst of the sterile drum machine beat.
Ultimately, I think this is what critics find discomforting about Housman: he’s what we all fear we are. Technically sound, but only a few ideas, often inartfully expressed. We all wish we were the genius, but most of us are the workman clocking in and out.