Alex Larman at the Guardian's blog comments on Radio 4's recent bio of A. E. Housman:
Housman's reputation burgeoned in the 20th century, partly because of the support of writers such as Kingsley Amis and Betjeman, and partly because in the poetry of Larkin (who described him as "the poet of unhappiness"), there were clear echoes of Housman's wry, wistful reflections on a bygone England that probably never had existed in the first place. Seventy years after his death, Tom Stoppard's masterly and underrated play The Invention Of Love sought to compare the repressed existence of Housman with the fin-de-siècle of Wilde and the Aesthetic movement, giving Housman a sympathetic hearing as a passionate, brilliant man unable to break out against the strictures of society.
This century, Housman's reputation seems to have plummeted. There has been no major biography of him, perhaps on account of the dullness of his life, nor any serious reevaluation of the poetry. He was unfortunate in that he was neither a flashy aesthete nor a daring modernist, producing old-fashioned verse that used simple forms and unflashy language to evoke time, place and mood with consummate skill. Perhaps surprisingly, it was Alan Hollinghurst who has been his most public advocate of late, writing a well-considered and moving foreword to a recent collection, which made a cogent argument for why Housman should be considered first and foremost a queer writer. In his work, with its subtle themes of disguise, ever-shifting personae and, of course, "the love that dare not speak its name", Housman now seems to be closer to his decadent and modernist peers than before. Perhaps Stoppard's comparisons with that great dissembler Wilde are more apt than ever.
Very strange: "This century, Housman's reputation seems to have plummeted" --- ?
Comments