A.E. Housman was one of B.’s
favorite poets. He was English, born in 1859, died in 1936. He was mainly
reclusive in his life, possibly since he was a homosexual man at a time when
that was an outright dangerous thing to admit to publicly. He was acclaimed as
a scholar and poet in his lifetime, though. His first book of poems, A Shropshire Lad was a huge hit, and his
second, Last Poems, published in
1922, was also very popular. His poetic themes included unrequited love—he fell
in love with his heterosexual roommate in college—and death. (Maybe it’s no
surprise then that B. liked him so much.) He was an emotional late-Romantic. The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry
notes that, “Houseman appears to have thought of himself as a loser,
predestined to see hopes dashed and love unrequited.” (Now I really see why B.
liked him so much—Housman was his spiritual antecedent!)
Housman’s poems have that
old-timey 19th century strict rhyme and meter, without the ear to
vary it that the better poets, the Romantics and further back, had. Norton says his poems have a “limited
lyricism, yet his poems stay in the mind and even outlast less limited ones.
They are easily parodied, as is his esthetic, and perhaps inseparable from an
element of ‘camp.’ Yet they have a refined agony, a stylized pain, a kind of
courtly lovelornness which ensures their memorability.” I find a kind of
stylized pain in this kind of critical language, but that’s just me. It’s not any
worse than the next-generation stuff I had to read in grad school, which takes
stylized rhetorical pain to incredible new heights, mainly to demonstrate the
diabolical tolerance for it the writer had, I always figured. But I digress.
“To an Athlete Dying Young” by
A.E. Housman.
I’ve read that the Romans would
occasionally sneak up and kill a triumphant conquering war hero on his chariot during
his tickertape parade through the streets of Rome, as a further tribute [thanks
for nothing, is what I think…], ensuring the immortality of his triumph and
sparing him that inevitable decline into old age and irrelevance and
non-triumph that certainly awaited him after the glorious apex of this his
victorious recognition. This poem has elements of that, though the athlete isn’t
gloriously murdered. He just died. But his aging, decrepit life will no longer
outrun his triumph. (This is so anti-Berryman’s life it’s almost comical.) Now,
he’s only triumphant, though dead, but we all die eventually, so there’s that. Freud
called this whole process rationalization,
I believe: He’s dead, but thank
God he was a hero! But when a young
man—such a winner already, and full of even more promise—dies, well, you do the best you can. Lay a laurel wreath on his
tombstone, shed a tear, and name a school after him. Sing songs about him, tell
the kids, recite poems written in his honor. Erect a statue. Triumph is public
property and shouldn’t be wasted. And a dead hero gives it a much longer shelf
life.
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