Housman Reveals How He Wrote Poetry

Evening Post, Volume CXVI, Issue 19, 22 July 1933, Page 19

Housman Reveals How He Wrote Poetry

Choosing "The Xame and Kature of Poetry" as the title of his address, Professor A. E. Hoiisntan .delivered the Leslie, Stephen Lecture at Cambridge recently. Ho is known at that University as the Professor of Latin and the editor of many Latin texts; but to the -world he is still the author of "The Shropshire Lad" and "Last Poems." Few writers have obtained a reputation so solidly founded as Housman's with so little output to back it up. Forty years have passed since the first volume appeared, and over a decade since the second with its melancholy little preface which told the world to expect no more of that kind of work from the author. Poetry, according to Professor Housmau, is more physical than intellectual, and it is interesting to learn from a poet, as one does from this lecture, how poetry can come into being. He says he knows how his own work was created, but he doea not claim the right to assume that any other poetry comes into existence in the same way. His own process is explained in the following extract from the lecture.

"Having drunk a pint of beer at luncheon—beer is a sedative to the brain, and my afternoons are the least intellectual portions of my life—l would go for a walk of two or three hours. As I went along, thinking of nothing in particular, only looking at. things around me and following the progress of the seasons, there would (low into i»v

mind,' with sudden and unaccountable emotion, sometimes a line or. two of verse, sometimes a whole stanza at once, accompanied, not preceded, by a vague notion of the poem they were destined to form part of. Then (.here would usually be a lull of an hour or so, then perhaps the spring would bubble up again. I say bubble up because, so far as I could make out, the source of the suggestions thus proffered to the brain was an abyss which I have already had occasion, to mention, the pit of the stomach.

"When I got home I wrote them clown, leaving gaps, and hoping that further inspiration might be forthcoming another day. Sometimes it was, if I took my walk in a receptive and expectant frame of mind; but sometimes the poem had to be taken in hand and completed by the brain, which wa,s apt to be a matter of trouble and anxiety, involving trial and disappointment, and sometimes ending in failure. I happen to remember distinctly the genesis of the piece which stands last in my first volume. Two of the stanzas, I do not say which, came into my head just as they are printed, while I was crossing (tie corner of Hampsted Heath between the Spaniard's Inn and the footpath to Teinplc Fortune. The third stanza, came with a little coaxing after tea. One more was needed, but it did not conir; I had to tnni to find compose it myself, ant! that was a laborious busi-

ness. 1 wrote it thirteen times, and. Lt tv:is more thnn it twelve-month befor* I got it light. "