Housman, A.E. : Alfred Edward Housman (1859-1936), English poet & classical scholar whose lyrics express a Romantic pessimism in a spare, simple style.
... 307 Gray 234 H Hartz, Richard 356,360,362 higher and lower hemispheres 306 Hiranyagarbha 99 Homer 132,186,205,213,258 horse 310 hostile forces 303 Housman,A.E. 26,265 hrdaye guhāyām 165 Huta 281,298,330 hymns to Agni 299 I Ignorance 248 immortality 61,83,90,303 Inconscience 80,95,247,260,321,328 Inconscient 252 ... On Sri Aurobindo's Savitri Index A absolute Self 99 adesh 212 A.E., AE 33,197,367 Aeschylus 205 Agni 298 ahan 303 Akash 174 Amal Kiran first article about Savitri 1 first contact with Savitri 50,316 lines of poetry 262 Sri Aurobindo - the Poet 316 The Poetic Genius of Sri Aurobindo ...
... Highet, Gilbert. The Classical Tradition (Oxford University Press, London, 1951). People, Places and Books (Oxford University Press, London, 1953). Page 487 Housman, A.E. The Name and Nature of Poetry (Cambridge University Press, London, 1933). Hudson, Derek (Ed.) English Critical Essays, XX Century, Second Series (Oxford University ... Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry.) II. BOOKS BY OTHERS Abercrombie, Lascelles. The Idea of Great Poetry (Martin Seeker, London, 3 rd Impression, 1926). A.E. Voices of the Stones (Macmilian, London, 1925). The House of the Titans (Macmillan, London, 1934). Aiyangar, Narayan. Essays on Indo-Aryan Mythology (Bangalore, 1898). Alexander ...
... in a process, not in a result.. .we do not understand a great poem till we have felt it through and as far as possible recreated in ourselves the emotions which it originally carried." 123 And A.E. Housman says that it is the peculiar function of poetry, "not to transmit thought, but to set up in the reader's sense a vibration corresponding to what was felt by the writer." 124 The ...
... The Thinking Corner A Poet on Poetry By far the boldest definition of poetry is A.E. Housman's in that much-in-little of a book, The Name and Nature of Poetry, which I have recently read again. Yes, the boldest - and yet it seems to be both natural and penetrating, a logical completion of the hints thrown out by other poets concerning their own art. Wordsworth's... never-ending kiss. On contacting great poetry a mind above tosh may have the physical disturbances Housman speaks of, but it will know great poetry even without them. Its presence is felt as in the words of Eliphas the Temanite quoted by Housman: "A spirit passed before my face." That, like Eliphas, Housman could also say, "The hair of my flesh stood up" shows, however, a noble sensitivity on his part... on the head of gibberish and phantasmagoria - but one's fears are laid at rest by Housman. He illustrates his thesis by choosing no less a genius than Blake: this choice is a very nugget of the true gold of critical perception. The traditional example of poetry neat and pure is Coleridge's Kubla Khan. Housman plunges still nearer the heart of things by selecting work which goes even beyond the ...
... Sri Aurobindo 18 JANUARY 1940 NIRODBARAN: We had once heard from you that Blake is greater than Shakespeare. SRI AUROBINDO: I didn't say that. It is Housman who says Blake has more pure poetry than Shakespeare. NIRODBARAN: What does he mean by that? SRI AUROBINDO: He means that Blake's poetry is not vital or mental, it is not intellectual but comes... covering a lot of life. NIRODBARAN: But can one compare two or more poets and decide who is greater? SRI AUROBINDO: How can one? NIRODBARAN: You have said that Yeats is considered greater than A.E. because of his greater poetic style. SRI AUROBINDO: Yeats is more sustained. NIRODBARAN: Then there is some standard? SRI AUROBINDO: What standard? Some say Sophocles is greater than Shakespeare ...
... group, William Watson, Thomas Hardy, A.E. Housman and Robert Bridges. Page 413 I did not deal with all these poets because it was not in the scope of my idea to review the whole literature, but to follow only the main lines. But the main difficulty was that at the time I had no books and could only write from memory. I have read nothing of Housman—what I had read of Watson or Hardy did... mere technique and artifice or through a straining towards the merely out-of-the-way or the perverse. But there seems to be no other door of progress than to make the endeavour. 10 October 1932 Housman, Watson, Hardy, Bridges I hear from Nolini that you want two books (reviewed in the New Statesman) representing the achievement of the seventeenth-century "Metaphysicals", in order to add some... poetry and has to be dealt with according to its kind and nature. There is a sequence, a logic, a design in them, but not one that can satisfy the more rigid law of the logical intelligence. About Housman's theory; it is not merely the appeal to emotion that he posits as the test of pure poetry—he deliberately says that pure poetry does not bother about intellectual meaning at all—it is to the intellect ...
... Savitri Index Abb é Bremond 316 Abercrombie, Lascelles 283,375,409,445 A.E. (George Russell) 266,306 Aeschylus 267 53,318,319,458 Aiyangar, Narayan 279 Alexander, Samuel 436 Anouilh, Jean 267 Ariosto31,383 Arnold, Sir Edwin 335 Arnold... 411,412,414 Hodgson, Ralph 367 Homer 53-55,265,267,319,320,370,381, 383,384,387,398,399,401 Hopkins, G.M. 75,98,314,368,455 Horu Thakur 45 Housman, A.H. 56 Hugo, Victor 377 Human Cycle, The 38,56,293,359,459 Huxley, Julian 37 Page 494 ...
... in the mystic—poem the mind is submerged in the vividness of the reality and any mental explanation falls far short of what is felt and lived in the deeper vital or psychic response. This is what Housman in his book tries to explain with regard to Blake's poetry, though he seems to me to miss altogether the real nature of the response. It is not the mere sensation to which what he calls pure poetry... sake of the thought proceeds from an extreme romanticist temper; it reaches its acme on one side in the question of the surrealist, "Why do you want poetry to mean anything?" and on the other in Housman's exaltation of pure poetry which he describes paradoxically as a sort of sublime nonsense which does not appeal at all to the mental intelligence but knocks at the solar plexus and awakes a vital and... to me a reasoning from the conventions of a past order which cannot apply to a new poetry dealing with spiritual things. A new art of words written from a new consciousness demands a new technique. A.E. himself admits that this rule makes a great difficulty because these "high light" words are few in the English language. This solution may do well enough for him, because the realisations which they ...
... arrangement. December 30, 1936 × "My spectre around me night and day... ", The Name and Nature of Poetry by A.E. Housman. pp. 43-44. × vaktavya : theme. ... to be something different from what Housemann means. [Sri Aurobindo put a question mark above "Housemann".] What's this spelling? He is not a German. Housman is not a symbolist or impressionist in theory—V 67 He [Housman] says a poet's mission is to "transfuse emotion" which Mallarmé had not! Indeed? because the professor says so? How easily you are impressed by anybody's opinion... works, but now that they understand the significance also they consider him very great. Isn't that so? They understand the significance? in what way? By allegorising them? Read the remarks of Housman on the magnificent poem of Blake he quotes in full and the attempts of people to explain it. 52 I quite agree with him there though not in his too sweeping theory of poetry. To explain that poem ...
... presents as good examples of Sri Aurobindo's delicately poised and nuanced judgment as literary critic his contrastive comparison between Shakespeare and Whitman and his rejection of the view of A.E. Housman who claimed superiority for Blake over Shakespeare as a pure poet. Along the way, Sethna brings forward several acute incidental observations of Sri Aurobindo sparked off in the course ...
... of the pervading malaise and the sense of the broken backbone was totally gone. I may add that A.E. Housman used to say that he knew he was in the presence of poetry when what he read brought tears to his eyes, made his hair stand on end and his solar plexus felt pierced. Sri Aurobindo, after reading Housman, referred to the solar plexus apropos of his process of getting the correct version in his epic ...
... are pictured; its vision is from within, composed of its own substance and lit up with its own vast vitality. As a result, the pictures are at once extra-immediate and extra-remote: they make, as A.E. Housman would have said, an impact upon our solar plexus as no mental reflection of mystical realities can, but while convincing us of their living concreteness they dodge our mental apprehension by refusing... of Sri Aurobindo. The former is rare enough, but at times it does occur in other mystical poets. There are a few snatches in Yeats, many in A.E., for Yeats, for all his attraction towards the unseen world, had no strong eye for the supremely spiritual. A.E. had a far closer acquaintance with it, yet he too did not go beyond the heart's lyrical God-drunkenness, the glamour of the Celtic mid-worlds... pitch is: Page 33 Like winds and waters were her ways. They heed not immemorial cries; They move to their high destinies Beyond the little voice that prays. What A.E. lacks on the whole in dealing with the ultra-mental afflatus is fullness of rhythm - his genuine seizures of it are often thin in sound-stuff and hence unable to drive home its varied cosmicity, so ...
... beyond a swirl of electrons; still when A.E. sounds his crystal note of the Undying Ones that are not clay, we feel caught up into a realm of crowned souls, a world of wizardry uncharted by Planck and Schroedinger. And paradoxical though it may seem, our firmest faith in A.E.'s occult "Candle of Vision" will not drive back the shadow that falls upon us from Housman's exquisite agnosticism: like a final... of Sri Aurobindo. The former is rare enough, but at times it does occur in other mystical poets. There are a few snatches in Yeats, many in A.E., for Yeats, for all his attraction towards the unseen world, had no strong eye for the supremely spiritual. A.E. had a far closer acquaintance with it, yet he too did not go Page 128 beyond the heart's lyrical God-drunkenness, the glamour... pictured; its vision is from within, composed of its own substance and lit up with its own vast vitality. As a result, the pictures are at once extra-immediate and extra-remote: they make, as A. E. Housman would have said, an impact upon our solar plexus as no mental reflection of mystical realities can, but while convincing us of their living concreteness they dodge our mental apprehension by refusing ...
... speaking]. What a poem on A.E., the poet I loved best in the West. With all your enthusiasm for Page 82 Yeats Guru, Yeats has meant very little indeed to me, I have never been able to warm up to him, but A.E.—yes. I have often been more deeply moved by A.E. than I could account for—his note rang tome so [true ?]. That was why I have been so deeply stirred by Harm's on A.E. Do write a sonnet... Yeats, but I recognise his great artistry in language and verse in which he is far superior to A.E.—just as A.E. as a man and a seer was far superior to Yeats. Yeats never got beyond a beautiful mid- world of the vital antariksa [mid-world]—he has not penetrated beyond to spiritual-mental heights as A.E. did. But all the same when one speaks of poetry, it is the poetical element to which one must... least on him Guru—don't you think he deserves it—in these days when people pooh-pooh mystic poetry (as Thomson wrote to me) when A.E. still stood to his guns on his lonely heights. Why you really set so much store by Yeats I can't gather—he is often so impossibly obscure. But A.E. is never so. His has been a note of calm grandeur to me. And it is significant that a poet of Harm's genius regards him as the ...
... 18-1-1940 – Morning Disciple : We heard from you that some people consider Blake greater than Shakespeare – is it correct? Sri Aurobindo : I did not say that. What Housman says is that Blake has more pure poetry than Shakespeare. Disciple : What does he mean by that? Sri Aurobindo : He means that Blake’s poetry is not vital or mental, i.e. intellectual... Disciple : But can we compare poets and decide who is greater? Sri Aurobindo : How can you? Disciple : But you said, for instance, that Yeats can be considered greater than A.E. because of greater style. Sri Aurobindo : "More sustained'' style. Disciple : Then, there is some standard – say, power of rhythm, expression, subject, form, substance, variety ...
... with Baron, why do you want to understand? why do you want to cut it up into the dry mathematical figures of the Intellect? Hang it all, sir! In spite of myself you are making me a convert to the Housman theory and Surrealism. No, Sir—feel, instand, overstand, interstand, but don't try to understand the creations of a supra-intellectual Beauty. It is enough to feel and grasp without trying to "... spoken of is not the sole Divinity? ... For the time being there is no God but the jealous God—all Godhead is seen as a jealousy directed against human love and happiness. It was this that drew from A.E. that remark: he could find nowhere in the poem the distinction you make between the time and essential Godhead and a construction out of universal appearances.... Page 474 Do you wish ...
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