Shropshire Lad Research Articles

Beethoven 's Blue Remembered Hills

Various commentators have noted Beethoven's use of a monotone in the second song of his cycle An die ferne Geliebte, where the repetition of a single note serves to conjure up the power of memory. This monotone served as a model for several subsequent composers of song cycles, often in a similar context when their singer/narrator recalls things that are past - from Peter Cornelius to Arnold Bax. In the case of Arthur Somervell's A Shropshire Lad, a further correlation is found between his poet's "blue-remembered hills" and Beethoven's "Berge so blau".

Locating stylistics in the discipline of English studies: a case study analysis of A.E. Housman’s ‘From Far, from Eve and Morning’

Abstract Literary stylistics, whose subject matter is literary language, straddles the disciplines of literary criticism and linguistics, as Henry Widdowson pointed out 45 years ago. Since then, developments in discourse analysis and multimodal studies have had the potential to expand the map of the interactions between different disciplines. This case study performs a traditional stylistic analysis of the poem ‘From Far, from Eve and Morning’ from A E Housman’s A Shropshire Lad but also demonstrates the potential for a multimodal perspective on stylistics by relating it to a musical analysis of Vaughan-Williams’ setting of the poem. It begins with a linguistic analysis of phonology, graphology and punctuation, lexis, phrase structure, clause structure and clausal semantics. It proceeds to a discourse analysis of pragmatics and discourse structure. And it ends by relating the linguistic and discoursal analysis to the music through music criticism. By way of conclusion, it suggests that both linguistic analysis and appreciation of musical structure and mood are useful ways into Spitzer’s philological circle, by which linguistic analysis and musical appreciation can pave the way for literary appreciation.

КНИГА СТИХОВ Т. КИБИРОВА «НА ПОЛЯХ “A SHROPSHIRE LAD”» КАК МЕТАТЕКСТУАЛЬНЫЙ ФЕНОМЕН

The article is devoted to the book of poems, “On the margins of ‘A Shropshire lad’” (2007) by Timur Kibirov. It is marginalia to the poetic cycle of Alfred Hausman “The Shropshire lad” (1896). The metatextual elements by which Kibirov indicates the connection of his texts with the poems of the English poet are considered. We identify such characteristics of the metatext as secondary to the main work and the expression of the author’s will, aimed at demonstrating the creative process to the reader. Timur Kibirov marks his own words and forms a common intertextual field at the intersection of Hausman’s work, his own poetry and literary tradition in general. Original poems and marginalia are compared. The emphasis is placed on the graphic level of the book of poems: headings, epigraphs, notes, the use of italics, as well as cases of changing the language code. In the development of his creative input – total intertextual interplay – Kibirov writes a commentary on each of the 63 Hausman poems. Thus, the reader sees the places of coincidence and divergence of the Russian and English texts. A conclusion is made about the originality of the markers of the dialogue between the poetic cycles of Hausman and Kibirov, and about the specificity of the secondary markers, which reinforce the author’s beginning of the book of poems “On the margins of ‘A Shropshire lad’”.

Morpholo­gi­cal features and biometric characteristics of leaves of English rose varieties

Purpose. To study the morphological features and determine the biometric indices of leaves of English roses. Methods. Field, morphological, descriptive, biometric. Morphological descriptions were carried out in accordance with the Atlas of morphological features of rose varieties (Rosa L.) (2009) and the Illustrated Guide to Flowering Plant Morphology (2004). Results. The morphological features of the leaves of English rose varieties were determined. Quantitative (length of complex leaf, number of leaf plates, area of leaflet, total leaf area) and qualitative (leaflet shape, leaflet edge shape, leaflet base shape, leaflet tip) were studied. Varieties of English roses that have maximum and minimum values for these indicators were highlighted. Conclusions. The morphological features were revealed and the biometric indicators of the leaves of English roses from the collection of the State Dendrological Park “Alexandria” NAS of Ukraine were determined. The amplitude of variability of morphological characters of the studied varieties was determined. Peculiarities of the morphological structure and biometric parameters of leaves of English rose varieties can be diagnostic signs for determining varieties within the boundaries of the species. Plants with increased photosynthetic productivity of the leaf apparatus, which is characteristic of the ‘James Galway’ and ‘A Shropshire Lad’ varieties, have an advantage in landscaping.

Housman's Compassionate Didactic

Housman's Compassionate Didactic E. E. Sheng (bio) Man behind a mask." "A divided life." These subtitles of biographies of A. E. Housman attest to the surprise felt by many readers that the author of such popular and moving poetry should have been an acidulous philologist and former civil servant. Equally puzzling is the apparent discrepancy between the somber content of many of his poems and their consolatory effect. Clearly with such an intended effect, for instance, were these literally unhappy verses recently offered on a social media page, to "all those struggling with loss or having a hard time":1 That is the land of lost content, I see it shining plain,The happy highways where I went And cannot come again. How is it, as one critic wonders, that although "if you were to paraphrase [Housman's poems] or put them into French, they would seem consistently bleak," they nonetheless evince a "curious buoyancy, which proves a kind of resilience"?2 This essay begins by considering the question "why did Housman write poetry?"—both in the sense of what he wished his poetry to do ("why did Housman write poetry?") and in that of why he used poetry to do it ("why did Housman write poetry?"). These questions of purpose, which have not been addressed in detail by scholars of Housman, are particularly important in his case because some of the more lamentable misinterpretations of his poetry stem at least in part from mistaken suppositions about his purpose. Critics have variously labeled his poetry adolescent, self-centered, despairing, or even misanthropic. Housman's attitude, says A. F. Allison, is that "of the child whose party has been spoilt," and his poetry sometimes possesses "neither kindliness nor fortitude nor sanity of judgment"; it contains, says Randall Jarrell, "more than a suspicion of the child's when I'm dead, then they'll be sorry"; for R. P. Blackmur, he is "a desperately solemn purveyor of a single adolescent emotion"; and William R. Brashear speaks of his "unmitigated anguish" and claims that [End Page 451] "despair . . . is central to Housman's poetry."3 But these assessments all tend to assume that Housman wrote essentially to express his own feelings, an assumption that is in fact unwarranted; and once we no longer simply assign the emotions exhibited by Housman's speakers to Housman, it becomes possible to consider why he adopted certain attitudes and emotions rather than dismiss them as the product of some psychological defect. Indeed, my examination of Housman's writings reveals an attitude the very opposite of adolescent or misanthropic, for they show that his motivation for writing poetry was primarily didactic and compassionate: to teach his audience certain unpalatable yet unavoidable facts about the human condition and, in teaching, to cause as little hurt and to make it as likely that these facts would be accepted as possible. I then suggest how this understanding of Housman's poetic purpose illuminates the criticism of his poetry, and in particular how it appeals and consoles despite its grim materialism; consider why Housman customarily adopted the persona of the rustic poet Terence; offer readings of a few poems from A Shropshire Lad; contextualize this understanding of Housman's poetics in a broader interpretation of his philosophy; and, in closing, situate his poetics in the didactic tradition. Why Did Housman Write Poetry? With one, polemical exception to which we shall return, Housman produced no extended statements on either poetry in general or his own poetry. We can do worse, then, than to start with the "Introductory Lecture" that he delivered at University College, London in 1892, on the purpose of scholarship. Housman devoted much more of his life to editing than to writing poetry, and what he says about scholarship may shed light on what he thought to be the worthy ends of human endeavor in general and have some application, a fortiori, to his poetry. Indeed, there are striking similarities between the fruits of learning as set out in the "Introductory" and the materialist metaphysics that Housman's poetry assumes and conveys. Each "compels us to take leave of delusions which were pleasant while they lasted," but still cannot be...

ENGLISH MODERNISM AND AMERICAN ‘TOURISTS’

In recent years, modernist studies have tended to nationalize issues, putting forward specific features of American and British modernist writings. This article treats Anglo-American modernism in terms of ‘the inverted conquest’ (A. Mejias-Lopez) with America ‘wrestling cultural authority from its former European metropolis’. The article starts with the subject of periphery and centre changing places, first in the imagination of American writers and then in reality. In F. M. Ford’s novelThe Good Soldierthe situation is seen as if the American would absorb the English. An American John Dowell outmatches and ultimately disparages ‘the good soldier’ and a superior Briton Ashburnham. The novel is analyzed as a result of pushing together two ways of writing - English and American (Jamesonian). Louis MacNeice treats the ‘Americanization of poetry’ inModern Poetry: A Personal Essay(1938). InAspects of Modern Poetry(1934) Edith Sitwell affirms the triumph of T. S. Eliot’s early poetry over ‘the bareness of the line’ in Housman’sA Shropshire Lad, famous for its poetical Englishness. A sort of latent urge to reaffirm Englishness against advancing Americanism is obvious in Virginia Woolf’s essays on American writers.

HOUSMAN'S SPECTRAL SHROPSHIRE

The fictional setting of the “Shropshire” of A. E. Housman's A Shropshire Lad (1894) is well known. He himself admitted to hardly having visited the county before the publication of his cycle of poems and the topography of the county in verse and actuality are often two different things. For instance, Hughley, whose steeple in the poems is a “far-known sign,” as Housman's brother Laurence discovered on a post-publication visit, is located in a valley and the remarkable spire turns out to be squat rather than soaring (Burnett, Letters 1: 90). The particular form of unreality that will be the subject of this paper is not, however, the physical backdrop of Housman's poems, imaginary or otherwise. Rather I would like to focus on the way in which the imaginative universe of Housman is populated by figures who challenge our assumptions about the boundary between the realms of the living and the dead. We might say that I will be concerned not with the epistemology of Housman's Shropshire but with its ontology, or perhaps, to use a term of Derrida's, with its “hauntology” (Specters 10, 51, 161). Indeed, my suggestion will be that far from being an untrue or fictional world, the phantasmal figures of Housman's Shropshire articulate that reality that is named, in the late work of Jacques Derrida, as the spectral. My essay will elaborate the question of the spectral as an interplay between the poems of Housman and the philosophical meditations of Derrida.

Orchestral Works by George Butterworth (review)

COMPLETE ORCHESTRAL WORKS OF GEORGE BUTTERWORTH George Butterworth. Orchestral Works. Edited by Peter Ward Jones. London: Stainer and Bell, 2012. (Musica Britannica, 92.) [Pref. in Eng., Fr., Ger., p. xvii-xix; introd., p. xxi-xxxiv in Eng.; the sources, p. xxxv- xliii; editorial notes, p. xliv; acknowledgments, p. xlv; facsims., p. xlvi- xlix; score, p. 3-145; notes, p. 147; textual commentary, p. 148-49. Cloth. ISMN 979-0-2202-2325-9; ISBN 978-0-85249-924-5. £86.]Musica Britannica has in its ninety- second volume finally made it to the twenti- eth century. Admittedly, the two volumes surveying the song repertories of Hubert Parry (vol. 49, published 1982) and Charles Villiers Stanford (vol. 52, pub. 1986) con- tain a few numbers composed after 1900, but with the present volume there is a clear departure from the early explicit intent to publish British music from earlier than the twentieth century which has not been made available to the public by commercial pub- lishers (quoted in Julian Rushton, Voice of Britain, Musical Times 136, no. 1831 [September 1995]: 472). This edition would not pass that standard: the music is too recent, and-thanks to the efforts of the composer's father-almost all already published posthumously in generally faith- ful editions, albeit nearly a century old and now freely downloadable. In this light it is difficult to see the present volume as neces- sary for much more than canonization, and it is curious to note that it was a rather late entry to the Musica Britannica rolls, judg- ing from the preceding volumes' lists of volumes in preparation.The significance of George Butterworth (1885-1916) in British music history is se- cured principally on the high esteem in which Ralph Vaughan Williams held him (long intending, indeed, that his own es- tate would benefit the Butterworth Trust; in the end, he opted to establish the RVW Trust, but he would certainly have been de- lighted that it in turn has subsidized the production of this Butterworth volume). Augmenting this was his poignant fate to be cut down in battle-and so to become one of The lads that will die in their and never be old, to quote a memorable A. E. Housman line that Butterworth set in his Six Songs from Lad (1911). But was he in his glory at all? Did he ad- vance beyond just the first glimmers of early maturity? It is difficult to know, be- cause in an effort to set his house in order before going off to the trenches, he de- stroyed the manuscripts of many of his early works. whole of Butterworth's ex- tant orchestral oeuvre is represented by the four short works (plus a fragment) in- cluded in this volume. Why it was not made twice its size, to encompass the balance of his Nachlass (songs, a few choral pieces, and a single string quartet-and all dating from the last seven years of his short life) is diffi- cult to say, and there is no indication that a future Butterworth volume is planned. This is a missed opportunity. Butterworth materials reside principally at the Bodleian Library of Oxford University; Peter Ward Jones, who spent a long career as music li- brarian there, is as knowledgeable as any- one on these sources. (Such a comprehen- sive volume would not have been the first for Musica Britannica: volume 8 presented the complete surviving works of John Dunstable.)The most frequently performed among the four complete orchestral works is his single work for large orchestra, the title of which evidently gave the composer some trouble. At first (1911) it was Land of Lost Content (a Housman reference), and subsequently Cherry Tree (as it borrows substantial motivic material from Butter- worth's setting of Housman's Loveliest of Trees). When it was published by Novello in 1917 the title page read SHROP- SHIRE LAD / RHAPSODY / FOR FULL ORCHESTRA and it has been generally known as simply A Lad. Musica Britannica opts for the version ultimately preferred by the composer, the slightly but significantly different A Shropshire Lad Rhapsody, a title which diminishes the pro- grammatic character and puts it in the company of generic titles qualified by a fill- in-the-blank nickname (as with Vaughan Williams's roughly contemporaneous A Sea Symphony and A London Symphony, and the later A Pastoral Symphony, all with the indefi- nite article in the title). …

Florilegium Housmanianum

Florilegium Housmanianum TOM KEELINE A Shropshire Lad II Pulcherrima arbor, cingere nunc comis ramos per altos, o cerase, albidis, omnes et in siluis uideris uere nouo superare flores. labuntur anni tam celeres; breue est 5 uitae et caducum quod spatium datur, uixique iam denos bis annos: quot maneant mihi quis, rogo, scit? ergo ante flores quam fragiles cadant, carpam fugacem nunc alacer diem: 10 siluas in antiquas eundum est ad cerasum niue et albiorem. arion 22.3 winter 2015 A Shropshire Lad II Loveliest of trees, the cherry now Is hung with bloom along the bough, And stands about the woodland ride Wearing white for Eastertide. Now, of my threescore years and ten, 5 Twenty will not come again, And take from seventy springs a score, It only leaves me fifty more. And since to look at things in bloom Fifty springs are little room, 10 About the woodlands I will go To see the cherry hung with snow. Tom Keeline 83 florilegium housmanianum 84 A Shropshire Lad XIII Annos bis denos habui iuuenilis et unum cum dixit sapiens haec mihi dura senex: “da, puer, argentum; cumulum auri disice, si uis, dummodo conserues pectus amore uacans; prodigus et bacas niueas nitidosque pyropos 5 sparge, sed ex animo ne, caue, totus ames.” sic sapiens dixit, frustra tamen: unius assis aestimat (heu!) iuuenis quae monet aequa senex. tempore et ille senex dixit seuerus eodem, “haud impune, puer, totus amare potes: 10 tristia tu repetes multas suspiria noctes; haec sine fine lues suppliciumque dabis.” bis nunc undenos habeo maturior annos: a! scio nunc recte me monuisse senem. Tom Keeline 85 A Shropshire Lad XIII When I was one-and-twenty I heard a wise man say, “Give crowns and pounds and guineas But not your heart away; Give pearls away and rubies 5 But keep your fancy free.” But I was one-and-twenty, No use to talk to me. When I was one-and-twenty I heard him say again, 10 “The heart out of the bosom Was never given in vain; ’Tis paid with sighs a plenty And sold for endless rue.” And I am two-and-twenty, 15 And oh, ’tis true, ’tis true. florilegium housmanianum 86 A Shropshire Lad XLVIII Esto, anime, immotus: titubas tu roboris expers, caela tamen semper terraque fixa ualent. nunc si maesta doles, horas modo respice longas olim quae requiem laetitiamque dabant. tum quoque crudeles homines odisse solebant, 5 rigauitque hominum lacrima multa genas; tum quoque sudabant miseri sanguisque fluebat, sed sensi domitus triste sopore nihil. nunc tamen intueor soles causamque requiro frustra: cur cogor talia fata pati? 10 esto, anime, immotus: non haec aerumna manebit, perque breues horas omnia ferre potes. caela (ecce!) alta gemunt, gemit et firmissima terra; tristia multa putas, omnia uana tamen: odisti simul et metuis; contemnis et horres— 15 excussus somno quando quiete fruar? Tom Keeline 87 A Shropshire Lad XLVIII Be still, my soul, be still; the arms you bear are brittle, Earth and high heaven are fixt of old and founded strong. Think rather,—call to thought, if now you grieve a little, The days when we had rest, O soul, for they were long. Men loved unkindness then, but lightless in the quarry 5 I slept and saw not; tears fell down, I did not mourn; Sweat ran and blood sprang out and I was never sorry: Then it was well with me, in days ere I was born. Now, and I muse for why and never find the reason, I pace the earth, and drink the air, and feel the sun. 10 Be still, be still, my soul; it is but for a season: Let us endure an hour and see injustice done. Ay, look: high heaven and earth ail from the prime foundation; All thoughts to rive the heart are here, and all are vain: Horror and scorn and hate and fear and indignation— 15 Oh why did I awake? when shall I sleep again? ...

Ambivalent Englishness: Ivor Gurney's song cycle Ludlow and Teme

This article looks at the song cycle Ludlow and Teme, written by Ivor Gurney in 1919. Gurney set poems from A.E. Housman's A Shropshire Lad (1896), which were popular with many composers in the early twentieth century. However, Gurney's recent war experience and his own war poetry tell a very different story from Housman's pre-war poetic versions of the military. The article examines the complex relationship between the songs and their texts. It looks at how Gurney, a poet and composer, uses Housman's words to write songs that both embrace and attack the military, exploring in music the same themes with which his own war poems are concerned.

The Can Of Ail: A. E. Housman’s Moral Irony

The Can Of Ail: A. E. Housman’s Moral Irony Donna Richardson (bio) Academic readers have been kinder to A. E. Housman’s poetry in the second half of the twentieth century than in the first half. Critical respect for Housman has increased considerably since the Times Literary Supplement’s fiftieth-anniversary assessment of A Shropshire Lad, which contains a handful of quotations used to exemplify broad themes such as “personal affection” or “external nature,” and which not surprisingly concludes that the popular appeal of his poetry “is not derived from its intellectual or its moral content. Housman is not a philosophical or an imaginative poet: he displays no Wordsworthian insight into the deep springs of human sympathy, no Shakespearean understanding of the range and intensity of human passions.”1 Since then, new critical editions of the poetry and letters have come forth and the Housman Society has been formed. Many more articles have taken his work seriously, for example those cited in the collections edited by Christopher Ricks and Philip Gardner.2 The debt of his poetry to his classical background has been more thoroughly explored; studies relating his work to larger contexts such as his gender-orientation and the historical conditions of late-Victorian society have broadened what had seemed to be the limited cultural scope of his few and simple poems. Not many critics, however, have found enough rhetorical and stylistic complexity in Housman’s poems to justify extended close readings of them. Housman has appeared to discourage such attention, because his prose criticizes many of the modernist philosophical assumptions and corresponding uses of language, especially tropes adapted from metaphysical wit, that evolved symbiotically with the practice of close reading.3 As a result, those interpreters who have given him credit for ironic wit have cited few detailed examples, implying that such wit is less than central to his purpose or practice.4 The one recent study that has done comprehensive close analysis of his poems maintains that Housman uses wit primarily to subvert his “official” level of meaning by creating a homoerotic subtext.5 I will argue, on the contrary, that Housman’s overt use of wit to convey both verbal and dramatic irony is central to his presentation of the human condition. In his first volume of poetry, A Shropshire Lad, Housman develops a rhetorical strategy that sets a precedent for interpreting the speakers in [End Page 267] his poetry, whether himself or others, as consciously but never sufficiently self-ironic. If Housman had written only his later poetry, in which he is generally the speaker, readers might be justified in assuming that authoritarian assertion characterizes his poetics and that his tone is the equivalent of William Ernest Henley’s self-congratulatory pessimism in “Invictus.” But in A Shropshire Lad, Housman elaborates on the narrative complexities of Blake and Wordsworth to dramatize an almost postmodern degree of irony about whether any speaker, including the author, can control the meaning of his actions or the implications of his language. Housman implies we can never avoid indulging in human ignorance and folly, even while doing our best to locate and criticize it in ourselves and others. The key to Housman’s strategy is that the speaker in most of this volume, a common country “lad” named Terence Hearsay, is also the author, who directs irony at both his past and present self. Terence has generally been interpreted as an uneducated innocent who seldom serves as Housman’s spokesman. But in LXII, the original end-poem of the volume, Terence implies he is the author of all the poems, and the story he tells of his trip to Ludlow Fair epitomizes the sophisticated self-irony he has already deployed in crafting the poems about his past self. In a pun which informs the entire volume, Terence says that the purpose of his acerbic wit is to help people face the “ill” of life rather than escape into “ale.”6 Yet the worst ill Terence’s language reveals in the Ludlow Fair episode is that he can never learn enough to face fully and resist indulging in the “ail” of his own emotional “ale.” Accordingly, in the preceding poems...

‘“Star-Defeated Sighs”: Classical Cosmology and Astronomy in the Poetry of A. E. Housman’

A. E. Housman is renowned as the scholar–poet who in his lifetime published two slim volumes of verse – A Shropshire Lad (1896) 1 and Last Poems (1922) 2 – a much larger volume of classical papers, and an edition of Manilius‘ Astronomica that remains the definitive Latin text to this day. Although Housman had little sympathy with Manilius‘s stoical beliefs about the operation of divine reason in the universe, both the poems and the Astronomica share the sense of human beings playing out their lives in a cosmos where stronger impersonal forces are at work. Since Astronomica is an extended astrological text, this is, of course, to be expected; in the poems, the cosmological and astronomical references are more subtly exploited and are derived from other classical authors, such as Lucretius, and Housman‘s own extensive knowledge of astronomy. Nevertheless, an awareness of such sources and references remains crucial for a fuller understanding of Housman‘s poetic achievement. The purpose of this article then is twofold. Firstly, and by way of setting a context for the second part, I seek to show briefly how Housman‘s poetry can be read as part of a more general struggle (shared by writers such as Tennyson, Browning, Hardy, Swinburne and Meredith) that took place in Housman‘s lifetime to confront the implications of advances in evolutionary theory, cosmology, and astrophysics, and to formulate a wider synthesis that integrated the objective facts of science with the subjective reality of human experience. Secondly, and primarily, I aim to show how an understanding of specific traditions in classical philosophy, and Housman‘s own expertise in spherical astronomy (itself a necessary adjunct to his classical scholarship), considered in the context of Housman‘s own worldview and his personal life, illuminates the reading of Housman‘s verse. The reconsideration of man‘s place in nature was a process that acquired a particular urgency in the second half of the nineteenth century. As Pamela Gossin observes in her similarly-intentioned treatment of the work of Thomas Hardy: Victorian Culture was uniquely situated to integrate its knowledge of astronomical and cosmological history – ancient to near modern – with its own emergent and every more urgent attempts to understand and explain humanity‘s place in the cosmos. (58)

Traces of A. E. Housman (and Shakespeare) in Hemingway

Hemingway admired Housman’s A Shropshire Lad but dismissed Last Poems . Yet Hemingway’s work shows traces of Housman poems from both volumes. There are resemblances between Housman’s “The Carpenter’s Son” and Hemingway’s “To Will Davies” and Chapter XV of in our time , Housman’s “Soldier from the wars returning” and “Soldier’s Home,” Housman’s “The Deserter” and A Farewell to Arms , Housman’s “Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries” and Hemingway’s “The Mercenaries,” and Housman’s “The Day of Battle” and “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.” In the last instance both Housman and Hemingway quote Shakespeare’s most famous lines on courage and cowardice.

Two Versions of Lucretius: Arnold and Housman

Mr Housman writes, for the most part, under the guise of 'A Shropshire Lad' the rustic namefather of his book. But this is evidently a mere mask. Mr Housman is no Shropshire Burns singing at his plough. He is a man of culture. He moves in his rustic garb with no clodhopper's gait, but with the ease of an athlete; and I think he has an Elzevir classic in the pocket of his smock frock. But it is not Theocritus, not the Georgics or the Eclogues; I rather take it to be Lucretius.1

Life and Death Decisions: Psychological and Ethical Considerations in End-of-Life Care

Life and Death Decisions: Psychological and Ethical Considerations in End-of-Life Care

George Butterworth’s Settings of A. E. Housman’s 'A Shropshire Lad'

Il arrive souvent que la poésie médiocre inspire une musique de grande qualité. «Le gars du Shropshire » de Houseman est un cycle de poèmes puissant mais inégal qui, en dépit de ses faiblesses, a incité plusieurs compositeurs britanniques à les mettre en musique. Les mélodies de George Butterworth (1885-1916) sur six poèmes de ce cycle constituent l ’une de ses œuvres les plus réussies et les plus réputées. Le présent article sera axé sur «Est-ce mon équipe qui laboure ? » que le talent du compositeur Butterworth métamorphose en transformant un simple poème sentimental en une œuvre puissamment dramatique.

Tale of two kings.

It was a pleasure to read Gretchen Vogel's News Focus article about the liver enzyme CYP3A and its possible role in physiology, and historically as a poison resistance mechanism for legendary rulers such as King Mithridates (“How the body's ‘garbage disposal’ may inactivate drugs,” 5 Jan., p. [35][1]). Accompanying the article was a picture of a stone carving of “King Mithridates” shaking hands with Hercules; however, the Mithridates in the carving is not the King Mithridates of Pontus (Mithridates Eupator/Euergetes VI “the Great,” 120 to 63 B.C.) featured in the article and in A. E. Housman's poem (LXII in “A Shropshire Lad) for having built up his poison resistance by ingesting small amounts throughout his lifetime. The famous stone carving pictured was located in ancient Arsameia in what is now southeastern Turkey. In the first century B.C., the area belonged to the kingdom of Commogene and was referred to by the Romans as Cappadocia. The region of Pontus, on the other hand, was located to the north, bordering the Black Sea. The carving was erected around 50 B.C. by King Antiochus I Theos in the memory of his father, King Mithridates I Callinicus, son of Samus I and King of Independent Commagene, who reigned from 96 to 70 B.C. These two “Mithridati” are separate historical rulers whose lives and names nevertheless overlapped, with King Mithridates of Pontus admittedly gaining more historical clout and the ever-coveted title “the Great” by defeating some of Rome's best generals of the day such as Pompey, Lucullus, and Sulla, and resisting assassination attempts by poison—apparently by priming his CYP3A enzyme—to feature in a Housman poem. Science regrets the error, which John Spitzer of the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore, Maryland, also brought to our attention. As Spitzer noted, “With friends like Hercules, [Mithridates of Commagene] didn't need any CYP3A enzymes to protect him against his enemies.” [1]: /lookup/doi/10.1126/science.10.1126/SCIENCE.291.5501.35

E. M. Forster’s Reconfigured Gaze and the Creation of a Homoerotic Subjectivity

Would you care to read my novel? ... To you it will reveal a new and painful world, into which you will hardly have occasion to glance again: a tiny world that is generally unknown to all who are not born in it. --E. M. Forster to Florence Barger regarding Maurice (Selected Letters 1: 223) While E. M. Forster's novels can certainly be read as straight by mainstream audiences, they simultaneously allow a gay male readership to identify in them a distinctively homoerotic subtext, a subjectivity that allows for a reading or readings that are distinct from the conventional heteronormative interpretation. One of the major ways in which Forster achieves this dual subjectivity lies in his radical reconfiguration of the male gaze as Jacques Lacan defined it, and as both feminist and psychoanalytic critics have applied it to twentieth-century literature and film. By switching the gendered object of the male gaze from female to male, and by disrupting the progress of his narratives at important moments during which the reader is invited to gaze on a tableau in which the male body is the central focal point, Forster invented a kind of narration that powerfully expresses male homoerotic desire while shrewdly maintaining the veneer of heterosexual conventionality. By nineteenth-century standards the tableau is not necessarily unusual; Forster is not unique in allowing his narrators to indulge in describing highly visual scenes in which little action and no dialogue intrudes. Yet while in Victorian terms the tableau functioned to emphasize a critical, dramatic moment, a point frozen in time, Forster's tableaus tend to be disruptive rather than emphatic, and dynamic rather than static in terms of their effect on the narrative. In many cases his tableaus alter and drive forth the course of the plot dramatically, as will be discussed in the cases of his novels Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905), The Longest Journey (1907), and Room with a View (1908). This essay will explore the manner in which Forster reconfigures the gaze in these tableaus to create a homoerotic subjectivity particularly designed to appeal to a gay male readership. Although the responses of heterosexual women to his alteration of the gaze may have been similar to those of gay men, particular clues embed ded in Forster's texts suggest ways in which a male homosexual audience is specifically being targeted. As the field of queer theory has emerged, scholars have begun to explore the ways writers have found to express the homosexual perspective in works written before the open acknowledgment of homosexuality became acceptable. Ed Cohen has used the term ec-centric to describe men of the late Victorian period whose self-awareness drove them to find ways to express their true selves through their writing. Ec-centric writers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had to invent ways to represent aspects of themselves that had been unrepresentable before (88); very often one can detect a homoerotic subtext in such writers' works. Cohen points to John Addington Symonds as one of the first scholars who persistently attempted to define what he considered an aura of difference in literature in which he perceived such a subtext, as in Sidney and Whitman. Writing in the latter half of the nineteenth century, Symonds was perhaps the first to acknowledge and to attempt to delineate the concept of homote xtuality in literature. (1) Contemporary scholars have continued Symonds's endeavor to identify and to delineate homotextuality. Ruth Robbins's work on masculinity and homoeroticism in the poetry of Oscar Wilde and A. E. Housman provides an example of what such a study can yield. Robbins refers to both of these poets' attempt to use a poetic to articulate homosexual desire in their poetry (138). Of Housman she writes that A reader would have to work at being shocked or dazzled by Shropshire Lad-- unless, that is, (s)he was 'in the know' about the code which Housman was using (151). …

"One Fraction of a Summer Field": Forster and A. E. Housman

In Chapter 33 of Howards End, Margaret Schlegel pays her brief second visit to the house she will eventually inherit. As she walks the mile or so from Hilton station, her creator interrupts her pleasure in the landscape of Hertfordshire which had so captured him as boy to express his reservations about the literary embodiment of the English countryside. England, he complains, lacks a great mythology: the native has been unable to vivify one fraction of summer field, or give names to half dozen stars. The witches and the fairies are all it has managed, and England, Forster concludes, still waits for the supreme moment of her literature-for the great poet who shall voice her, or better still, for the thousand little poets whose voices shall pass our common talk.' It is touching and eloquent passage; it is also arrogant and difficult to account for. True, in 1927 Forster described Edward Thomas, with his many evocations in prose and poetry of pre-war English rural life and landscape, as the Bore-Laureate.2 But what of Shakespeare, Drayton, Milton, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Arnold? Elsewhere in Howards End Forster makes moving contributions of his own; but some of the imagery in Chapter 19, describing the panorama of south England from Ballard Down, is drawn from Shakespeare. And as Forster admitted to William Plomer in later years, the chapters set at in Shropshire (25-29) breathe the spirit of A. E. Housman.3 When, in Chapter 26, Forster states that Oniton thrilled [Margaret] with poetry, one murmurs almost automatically Never ask me whose.4 A Shropshire Lad had passed into our common talk by 1910, and Forster's imagination especially deeply. His implied exclusions in Chapter 33 of Howards End are thus unnecessarily sweeping. Is it too much to suspect that they constitute not only young writer's bid for

A. E. Housman: The Scholar-Poet

A.E. Housman, romantic poet and classical scholar, is best-known as the author of A Shropshire Lad and the meticulous editor of Manilius, the Latin poet of astronomy. In this first full biography, Richard Perceval Graves convincingly reconciles the two apparently conflicting sides of Housman's personality, and reassesses the reputation of a man who was something of a mystery even to his closest friends. 'This is bound to become the standard life' - John Carey, Sunday Times. 'Dispassionate and well-researched' - Philip Larkin, Guardian.