The World Beyond BetterMost > The Culture Tent
In the New Yorker...
Aloysius J. Gleek:
--- Quote from: Front-Ranger on June 24, 2017, 10:37:04 am ---Thanks for posting this, John. I particularly liked this paragraph, that made me think of Ennis:
What Pound missed was Housman’s music, which so lent itself to composers—the intensity of his tone and the tautness and compactness of his expression. Parker sees Housman’s habit of plainness and terseness as manifestations of English traits that amount to a sort of polite national understatement: modesty, restraint, stiff-upper-lipness. Housman is tight-lipped, certainly, but that doesn’t account for the feeling you sometimes get that the poems are so repressed they ought to bear warning signs like those found on tanker trucks: “Caution: Contents Under Pressure."
--- End quote ---
Wow. Good catch, Lee!
Look at this too:
But he could also be rude, aloof, brooding, and difficult. He suffered fools not at all, and was unable to tolerate a compliment. Willa Cather, who so admired his poetry that she made a pilgrimage to meet its author, found him “gaunt and gray, and embittered.” The whole encounter, she said, gave her “a fit of dark depression.” As Housman’s obituary in the London Times put it, “In his attitude to life, there seemed something baffled and even shrinking, as though he feared criticism and emotion alike more than he relished experience. . . . He valued confidence, but held back from intimate relations, and seemed to prefer isolation to giving himself away.”
And there's this,
something to really make you think,
this illustration from “A Shropshire Lad”:
From "A Shropshire Lad" by A.E. Housman, illustrated by wood engraver Agnes Miller"The Ballad of Reading Gaol
was written in the summer and autumn
of 1897 at Berneval, near Dieppe,
where Oscar Wilde stayed after his
release from prison. The poem was
inspired by A.E. Housman, in which
the following verses occur:"
ON moonlit heath and lonesome bank
The sheep beside me graze;
And yon the gallows used to clank
Fast by the four crossed ways.
A careless shepherd would keep
The flocks by moonlight there,
And high amongst the glimmering sheep
The dead man stood on air.
http://www.foliosociety.com/book/SPL/shropshire-lad
A Shropshire Lad
A. E. Housman
This timeless collection of Housman’s 63 elegiac poems features the
wood engravings by Agnes Miller Parker created for the 1940 edition.
FYI:
The Project Gutenberg eBook of A Shropshire Lad, by A. E. Housman
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/5720/5720-h/5720-h.htm
and
http://www.hoasm.org/AShropshireLad.html
IX
On moonlit heath and lonesome bank
The sheep beside me graze;
And yon the gallows used to clank
Fast by the four cross ways.
A careless shepherd once would keep
The flocks by moonlight there[*],
And high amongst the glimmering sheep
The dead man stood on air.
They hang us now in Shrewsbury jail:
The whistles blow forlorn,
And trains all night groan on the rail
To men that die at morn.
There sleeps in Shrewsbury jail to-night,
Or wakes, as may betide,
A better lad, if things went right,
Than most that sleep outside.
And naked to the hangman's noose
The morning clocks will ring
A neck God made for other use
Than strangling in a string.
And sharp the link of life will snap,
And dead on air will stand
Heels that held up as straight a chap
As treads upon the land.
So here I'll watch the night and wait
To see the morning shine,
When he will hear the stroke of eight
And not the stroke of nine;
And wish my friend as sound a sleep
As lads' I did not know,
That shepherded the moonlit sheep
A hundred years ago.
[*]Hanging in chains was called keeping sheep by moonlight.
ALSO, interestingly:
http://www.online-literature.com/forster/room_with_view/12/
A Room With a View
E.M. Forster
Part Two.
Chapter XII: Twelfth Chapter
It was a Saturday afternoon, gay and brilliant after abundant rains, and the spirit of youth dwelt in it, though the season was now autumn. All that was gracious triumphed. As the motorcars passed through Summer Street they raised only a little dust, and their stench was soon dispersed by the wind and replaced by the scent of the wet birches or of the pines. Mr. Beebe, at leisure for life's amenities, leant over his Rectory gate. Freddy leant by him, smoking a pendant pipe.
"Suppose we go and hinder those new people opposite for a little."
"M'm."
"They might amuse you."
Freddy, whom his fellow-creatures never amused, suggested that the new people might be feeling a bit busy, and so on, since they had only just moved in.
"I suggested we should hinder them," said Mr. Beebe. "They are worth it." Unlatching the gate, he sauntered over the triangular green to Cissie Villa. "Hullo!" he cried, shouting in at the open door, through which much squalor was visible.
A grave voice replied, "Hullo!"
"I've brought some one to see you."
"I'll be down in a minute."
The passage was blocked by a wardrobe, which the removal men had failed to carry up the stairs. Mr. Beebe edged round it with difficulty. The sitting-room itself was blocked with books.
"Are these people great readers?" Freddy whispered. "Are they that sort?"
"I fancy they know how to read--a rare accomplishment. What have they got? Byron. Exactly. A Shropshire Lad. Never heard of it. The Way of All Flesh. Never heard of it. Gibbon. Hullo! dear George reads German. Um--um--Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and so we go on. Well, I suppose your generation knows its own business, Honeychurch."
"Mr. Beebe, look at that," said Freddy in awestruck tones.
On the cornice of the wardrobe, the hand of an amateur had painted this inscription: "Mistrust all enterprises that require new clothes."
"I know. Isn't it jolly? I like that. I'm certain that's the old man's doing."
"How very odd of him!"
"Surely you agree?"
But Freddy was his mother's son and felt that one ought not to go on spoiling the furniture.
(....)
serious crayons:
--- Quote from: Jeff Wrangler on June 23, 2017, 07:56:58 pm ---But what would Mr. Shawn say? :laugh:
--- End quote ---
"Angsty" he might frown upon. "Gaydar," even in his final year as editor (1987) might leave him puzzled. Or if it didn't, he's think it certainly might confuse the readers. Now it's hard to imagine a New Yorker reader not being familiar with that term.
But let's face it, by now the magazine has supplied Mr. Shawn with plenty of material to roll in his grave about. :-\
Jeff Wrangler:
--- Quote from: serious crayons on June 24, 2017, 11:48:05 am ---But let's face it, by now the magazine has supplied Mr. Shawn with plenty of material to roll in his grave about. :-\
--- End quote ---
:laugh:
(Personally I usually associate angsty with teenage girls, like, maybe the girl in the Twilight books. ;D)
Front-Ranger:
Wow, John, I didn't realize that Ennis had so many literary ancestors! If the New Yorker was writing about Ennis today, I wonder if it would describe him as sheepish, sheepy or sheepsty!
And now we're into that awkward situation of leapfrogging discussion topics!
serious crayons:
--- Quote from: Jeff Wrangler on June 24, 2017, 12:21:34 pm ---(Personally I usually associate angsty with teenage girls, like, maybe the girl in the Twilight books. ;D)
--- End quote ---
I haven't read them, so I wouldn't know. But I would imagine hanging out with people who'd like to drink your blood would make you angsty.
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