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A.E. Housman's Rejected Addresses
This lecture took place on 19 September 2006
Dr Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, Magdalen College, Oxford
Ask me no more, for fear I should reply;
Others have held their tongues, and so can I…
A. E. Housman (1859-1936) has often provoked disagreement among his readers, but there is one aspect of his life and work that almost everyone agrees on: he was a reserved, even a repressed figure - 'self-absorbed, self-contained' (Katherine E. Symons), 'reticent and stiff' (Lawrence Housman), 'a strange union of deep passion with severe restraint' (John Sparrow). Housman himself recognised his tendencies towards the withheld and withdrawn, noting in his lecture 'The Name and Nature of Poetry' that his poems usually emerged as 'a morbid secretion, like the pearl in the oyster' - 'secretion'' neatly balancing the production and concealment of his voice on the page. Reading Housman's poems often asks for a similar poise, not least because it is not always clear when secrets are being kept and when they are being confessed: the experience of moving from line to line can be oddly like watching someone simultaneously performing a striptease and bundling on extra layers.
This tussle between reticence and release is played out in a number of different ways in Housman's verse: in its unstable encounters between lyrical self-expression and formal restraints; in allusions that turn individual lines into miniature models of human relations, caught between sympathetic approach and nervous recoil; in cancelled variants that still make their presence felt in a poem's final version, like unsatisfied ghosts; in syntax that is pulled on by desire and tugged back by regret. The standard biographical explanation for this state of affairs in Housman's career is the unrequited love he felt for his friend Moses Jackson - a love that, as Tom Stoppard has recently put it, took the form of a 'an unremitting, lopsided, lifelong, hopeless constancy to a decent chap who was in no need of it, temperamentally unsuited for it, and never for a moment inclined to call upon it; except in Alfred's daydreams.'
But this unlucky love should last
When answered passions thin to air…
It was a rejection which arrested Housman's emotional life while stimulating his creative life; only by writing poems could he find a voice for the simultaneous need to speak out and hold his tongue. Or so the story goes.
This lecture will explore how far commonly accepted ideas of repression (particularly the axis thought by Freud to connect homosexuality and creativity) are helpful in explaining the distinctive qualities of Housman's voice, and where else the hiding-places of his imagination are to be found. Above all, I aim to show that Housman is a far more unsettled and unsettling poet than many of his admirers like to think. 'You always know where you are with Housman', John Bayley once argued; but although A Shropshire Lad led to Housman being rooted in the popular mind as one of English literature's finest writers of imaginative topography, remoulding the landscape to fit the more obliging contours of memory and desire, it might be better to think of him as one of the great poets of displacement and disorientation. You never know where you are with Housman.
Robert Douglas-Fairhurst is Fellow and Tutor in English at Magdalen College, Oxford. He was educated at Pembroke College, Cambridge, and Princeton University (Procter Visiting Fellow, 1991-1992), held a Junior Research Fellowship at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge in 1995-1996, and from 1996 to 2002 was Fellow and Director of Studies in English at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. He is the author of Victorian Afterlives: the Shaping of Influence in Nineteenth-Century Literature (OUP, 2002), general editor of the Anthem Press series Nineteenth-Century Studies, and editor of the Tennyson Research Bulletin. He also writes regularly for the Daily Telegraph, Observer and Times Literary Supplement. He is currently writing articles on Keats, Dickens, and the tragic uses of disgust, and is also researching a book on Victorian magic.
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