Housman's Poetic Method: His Lecture and His Notebooks

Abstract

When A. E. Housman late one afternoon in May 1933 was delivering his Leslie Stephen Lecture on “The Name and Nature of Poetry,” there may have been some nodding heads in the Senate House audience, but only up to the moment he began to speak of his own methods of composition. He had over the years earned a reputation for the obduracy with which he repelled inquiry into this forbidden subject, but on this occasion he ended with a personal confession which his hearers debated long after they forgot his definition of poetry.