Into my heart an air that kills
Poetry of poetries; all is poetry!
Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?
That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.
A.E. Housman - A Shropshire Lad XL.
These are the eternal words of the legendary classicist and poet Alfred Edward Housman. The late Harold Bloom, upon being asked by Charlie Rose what poem will be in his heart as he draws his final breath, chose this one.1 It is succinct, but utterly beautiful in its succinctness. Its lyrics are lyrics of longing—nostalgia, in its truest form. Composed in interweaving couplets of iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter, two quatrains in ABAB rhyming scheme interlock in question and answer, rhetorically developing Housman’s landscape of nostalgia, then tragically elaborating on it. Arranging the poem in common metre, Housman introduces to his audience a folkish and ballad-like form. The poem, delicately layered in meaning, places the reader not just in the physical setting of those rolling Shropshire hills, but also in the poet’s psychological setting, and, further, the reader’s own. Housman evokes a universal contemplation of life, death and memory.
The fourtieth of sixty-three poems in A Shropshire Lad, ‘Into my heart an air that kills’ is representative of the whole. The collection, published in 1896, surged in popularity during the Boer War and, later, World War I, resonating in particular with young men, for whom the idealistic, Arcadian Shropshire seemed far preferable to the meaningless life and death of the fin de siècle period. So says Orwell, of his time at Eton: “these were the poems which I and my contemporaries used to recite to ourselves, over and over, in a kind of ecstasy.”2 The collection’s lyric character, with its simplistic rhymes and its evocative, naturalistic descriptions, lends itself well to memorisation. Indeed, the vast majority of the poems have also been set to music, such as Ralph Vaughan Williams’ On Wenlock Edge (1909) and George Butterworth’s (who was killed in the Somme) Six Songs from A Shropshire Lad (1911), Bredon Hill and Other Songs (1912), and Rhapsody, A Shropshire Lad (1913).
So why memorise? Why not simply read the poem off the page? And anyway, what is the purpose of poetry, at all? I posit that this poem, in eight lines, proves poetry’s function and extolls poetry’s form. It is beauty, a didactic beauty, that calls on us to remember what we already knew, that was obscured from us, that unleashes internally and externally a chain of eternally recurring impressions and expressions, bouncing from one mind to another—a static-electric ecstasy. Memorisation aids in this process; in memorisation, the poem becomes truly a part of memoriser. Now it exists within you in all its forms: written, spoken, and known. It becomes indistinguishable from one of your thoughts, encircling your mind. You begin to know it, as you know yourself—though, of course, to know thyself (Γνῶθι σαυτόν: gnōthi sauton) is easier said than done.3 Man remains fallen and fallible, after all.
Considering poetry from a memorised, and thus also spoken, perspective necessitates greater contemplation. As the words run over our tongues and through our brains, a deeper understanding emerges, as we weigh up each syllable and verse. We understand better the style, the rhythm and the flow of the poem. We understand better what derives from the poem, intellectually and emotionally. We detect the ever-extant tensions within the poem, and even the smallest decisions made by the poet in composition.
With all this in mind, I must begin to spin my web of rhetoric. Poetry’s beauty is reason enough for existence; yet, there is more to it than that. Though I write in prose, as I attempt to catch the truth in my net, I necessarily employ figures of speech—poetic figures—that is, poetry by other means. In a sense, as a write this, I prove my own point about the didacticism of poetry. As the Renaissance humanist Leonardo Bruni wrote, “the man who has not read the poets is, as it were, maimed as regards literature.”4 Poetry offers a perspective higher than the banal, base and profane. It unlocks in its reader some new mode of thinking, from which, crucially, anything can derive. As our friend Plotinus once said, “All teems with symbol; the wise man is the man who in any one thing can read another.” Poetry’s beauty is infinite. Poetry’s purpose is infinite. Poetry contains infinite possibilities, infinite universes. My first step on this never-ending road is to analyse and interpret this Salopian ode.
The first quatrain
Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?
We begin, in a sense, at the summit; for in the first line, the whole poem is contained. Our location is the heart, and it shall remain so throughout and forever. What does it mean to be buffeted by an air that kills? A vexing question—though the remaining verses do illuminate some meaning, the sea of fog never quite dissipates to reveal the valleys below. What is an air that kills? What is it killing?
Perhaps it is the freezing air of the Shropshire countryside in winter. A freezing wind that bites at your bones. Those blue hills? Coated with frost on a bleak winter morning. Or maybe tinged by the blue of a winter dusk. In succession to poem XXXIX, that reads in its final couplet, “Lie long, high snowdrifts in the hedge / That will not shower on me”, we might imagine a similar icy scape. Yet the physical setting of this poem is secondary; rather, it is the imagined setting, of both the speaker and the reader, that is fundamental.
The air kills in another, more vicious, sense. It is the painful nostalgia of loss that attacks the heart most severely. We as readers might envision the frozen fields of Shropshire, but it is the poem’s speaker who imagines what came before the tragic winter. What once was, is now dead—raw emotion nips at his heart, just like the frigid wind. This is a striking inversion. The air that we breathe, that ordinarily sustains us in life, is now transformed—it causes harm. The pain of loss, the pain of life and the pain of death are just as natural as taking a breath. This is the passage of time: memento mori.
Harold Bloom also interprets ‘an air that kills’ as “a snatch of song”.5 He writes, “whether as aria or as the remembered sensation of a breeze, the song or breath paradoxically slays, precisely where it should enhance life.”6 A curious conception; I hear no ‘aria’, here. When we augment our analysis with the ‘spires’ of line 3, perhaps we could say that Bloom means the music of country churches, or even their bells that ring out in the pristine calm? Bloom inspires me to suggest another interpretation, though not his: perhaps in reading ‘an air that kills’ as a ‘snatch of song’, we should understand it as the poem itself? The poem communicates the speaker’s nostalgia and pain—it is the ‘air that kills’. It cuts deep, and self-referentially admits that.
Moving onto the second line, we locate its origin—‘yon far country’. This is the idealised, now foreign, land that the speaker longs after. ‘yon’ greatly emphasises this fact; both archaic and rustic, the word refers to a past, separated from modern life. The past is a foreign country, after all. The placement of ‘blows’, the main verb of the clause, at the end of the second line is evocative of this distance. The idea blows from the beginning to the end of the couplet.
The composition of this first couplet, metrically and structurally, is also worth some analysis. Each metric foot is iambic (unstressed-stressed), except, I would suggest, the very first, which is inverted into a trochee (stressed-unstressed): INto / my HEART / an AIR / that KILLS | from YON / far COUN / try BLOWS. This trochee creates a rapid succession of two unstressed syllables, flowing, like the wind, directly into the stressed ‘heart’. The three remaining iambs stress the key words of the couplet in rapid succession: ‘heart’, ‘air’, ‘kills’. As the enjambment rolls over the line, the first verse is modified by the second, in three more iambs, stressing ‘yon’, ‘coun(try)’ and ‘blows’. A perfectly formed couplet.
Our second couplet—the rhyming responses to the first—asks three questions of Housman’s wistful landscape. It is a tricolon of cascading uncertainty; the iambs again stress the essential words, and most importantly, memory: What ARE / those BLUE / reMEM / bered HILLS | What SPIRES / What FARMS / are THOSE? Curiously, the speaker asks what these three features are, rather than perhaps an expected where? We encounter the ‘blue remembered hills’—are they blue from the frost, or blue from the melancholy of our speaker? What have they become to him, remembering them, in the present? Are they really so distant? Are the familiar farms and spires now so unfamiliar? The voice of the poem longs for surety, but cries out desperately, unable to find it.
Bloom interprets this section slightly differently. He focusses on the ‘blue remembered hills’ from a biographical perspective, for Housman did not grow up in Shropshire, but rather Bromsgrove in Worcestershire, and “had a sentimental feeling for Shropshire because its hills were on our Western horizon.”7 As such, the hills of Shropshire represented, according to Bloom, “a transcendent beyond, a happiness that the frustrated Housman never achieved.”8 Another commentator, Paul Methven, follows Bloom, arguing that “he evidently has no specific recall of any previous physical experience of, involvement in, or familiarity with, the actual panoramic landscape that he is, at the moment, presumably and reflectively, beholding.”9 Thus, the speaker remembers the landscape of his past in an entirely different, new landscape.
Neither are necessarily wrong, but it would be wise, I think, to separate Housman from the speaker. Rather, there exist three operating voices for us to consider in reading this poem: Housman himself, the speaker (the Shropshire Lad), often identified as Terence (as in poems VIII and LXII), though not every poem in the collection speaks with his voice, and, finally, the reader himself, to the degree that Housman leaves much up to his interpretation. Indeed, as Methven admittedly agrees, one could read the speaker as both Housman and the Shropshire Lad. I would, though, still tend towards a reading from the lad’s perspective, for he represents the generic troubled youth, and, by extension, all of us who experience the pain of loss.
Housman’s understanding of poetics certainly seems to favour this perspective, for he believed that “to transfuse emotion — not to transmit thought but to set up in the reader’s sense a vibration corresponding to what was felt by the writer — is the peculiar function of poetry.”10 Poetry’s core function is not to transmit the literal, biographical circumstances of the poet’s emotion, but rather endue the reader with an equivalent emotion, specific to him. For the Shropshire Lad, who presumably did grow up in Shropshire, these hills are remembered because they were familiar, but no longer are. The nostalgia is painful because these were the hills, spires and farms of his boyhood, which, even if they still geographically remain, are now nothing but memory. Terence’s voice is the voice of all young, melancholic men; and, more than that, the voice of all those who experience loss, pain and nostalgia.
Quatrain the second
That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.
In the final quatrain, uncertainty moves into certainty. The poetic voice concludes his lament, and names at last the object of his yearning. The ‘land of lost content’ is the answer to his three questions. We learn how he feels about this lost land, and why he feels such a bittersweet nostalgia. The ‘blue remembered hills’, ‘spires’ and ‘farms’ may remain, but the contentment derived from them in times past is but a memory.
In a sort of vision, the Shropshire Lad sees this land ‘shining plain’. It is an oxymoronic idea; yet, utterly coherent, playing with all the different semantic senses of the word ‘plain’. Plain in its simplicity—the fields and hedgerows of this patch of England are no more extraordinary than any other, except for their emotional significance to the speaker. Plain in its obviousness—the ‘land of lost content’ is at the forefront of his mind because it is so nostalgic to him. Plain also, perhaps, as a pun on its other meaning (field)! As well as this, there is a poetic noun-version of the word ‘plain’, meaning ‘lamentation’. Along with the many other elements of this poem, it is not so plain after all! This shining vision, writes Bloom, is described “as a pilgrim might insist he indeed beholds Jerusalem.” Zealotry, as emphatic as it is, is simple and straightforward. I think, in the end, Housman knew he was preaching to the choir—every reader regrets the impermanence of something in their life.
Now for the final flourish—a devastating last couplet summarises it all, in such simple beauty: “The happy highways where I went | And cannot come again.” What ease of emotion! What perfection of poesy! First, the triple alliteration of ‘happy highways’, ‘where I went’ and ‘cannot come’, whose syllables appear on the stressed beats of the two lines. Second, the evocation of those ‘happy highways’ recalls the played-on trails and paths of the ‘land of lost content’, and reinforces the poem’s folkish feel. Third, the use of the verb ‘come’, rather than perhaps a more natural alternative ‘go’ (indeed this is how Bloom in his Charlie Rose interview misquotes it), stresses the speaker’s longing, for he had once been there.
Strangely again Bloom applies Housman’s biography to the poem, assuming that, because those hills represented the ‘beyond’, “those “happy highways” belonged only to futurity, which is why Housman cannot come there again.”11 To me, this very much over-reads it, and bases it too much on Housman himself. Apparently (though I have found no definitive source for this) Housman composed this shortly after his father’s death. Thus, one could say that the poem is more likely to grapple with loss, nostalgia and memory, following my interpretation, than Bloom’s. I consider this equally reductive. I simply cannot mentally contort myself enough to agree with Blooms’s interpretation! Biography should never be ignored, but the critic should view it as one of many tools, not the sole one.
Bloom’s misquote of ‘go’, instead of ‘come’, evokes even more questions about word choice. Another example of a misquote comes from Peter Hitchens, reciting the poem on Question Time in 2012 (more on this later): “It is the land of lost content | I see it shining plain | Those happy highways | Where I went | And cannot come again.” Perhaps the errors might not be that important, but does not Housman’s explicit choice of ‘That’, rather than an alternative, evoke the speaker’s distance from that land (as with ‘yon’)? And does not ‘The’ rather than ‘Those’ ‘happy highways’ somehow also seem to make a difference, however slight? There is a difference, and the poet grants us the liberty to make our own choice about what that means.
A certain idea of poetry
So how does Housman’s poetic calculus inform us about the nature of poetry? ‘Into my heart an air that kills’ is the perfect formulation of his ideas. For Housman, the worst type of poetry was poetry that placed the intellect above the passionate, that is, the poetic. The eighteenth century, in his reasoning, was, in the main, the worst era of English poetry. Obsessed with all the ideas of the enlightenment, poets of that era focussed too much on poetry as “a trustworthy implement for accurate thinking and the serious pursuit of truth.”12 The result, as Matthew Arnold characterises, was “some repressing and silencing of poetry” and “some touch of frost to the imaginative life of the soul.”13 To compensate, eighteenth century poets resorted to an excess of ornament, often “pompous and poverty-stricken… a thick, stiff, unaccommodating medium”.14 Even John Dryden and Alexander Pope, the dominant poetic forces of the era, fell foul of this, no matter how great their works were. This eighteenth century was one of satire, exemplified by Tristram Shandy and the works of Jonathan Swift, not grandiosity.
For Housman, the greatest poets of this century were not Dryden, nor Pope, but “[William] Collins, Christopher Smart, [William] Cowper, and [William] Blake. And what other characteristic had these four in common? They were mad… elements of their nature were more or less insurgent against the centralised tyranny of the intellect, and their brains were not thrones on which the great usurper could sit secure.”15 Poetry can be enhanced by intellect, but only after the initial creation of the poetic idea. Housman describes the composition of poetry as a “passive and involuntary process… a secretion”.16 He explains his own process:
“I would go out 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 flow into my mind, with sudden and unaccountable emotion, sometimes a line or two of verse, sometimes a whole stanza at once, accompanied, not preceded, by some vague notion of the poem which they were destined to form part of.”17
After this initial sparking of the poem’s general idea, he would inject his intellect into the poem, composing the remaining necessary lines, and editing where he saw fit. Not all poets share his process, I’m sure, but it does somewhat reflect my own, whether in composing poetry or, indeed, writing prose. Great writing cannot be forced; it must flow, effusive, from the mind, or from whichever place of origin you attribute to it. That moment of sublimity soon yields to an intellectual struggle for completeness, unless you are lucky enough to be so inspired as to produce in one instant the poetic whole.
This poem is a striking example of Housmanian poesy. In eight lines, one so easily detects that poetic whole—the soul of the poem—feeling and understanding the poet’s biting yearning for the past. But neither is the poem at all slapdash in its delivery. Housman does not depend only on the reader’s empathy to relate to the speaker; rather, he develops detailed and rigorous verses that express, in the minutiae of metre, word choice and arrangement, the thoughts of the poetic voice. The poem is, in this way, enhanced.
A poetic pedagogy
Poetry stands on its own; it does not need a purpose. And yet, it inevitably has one, or many. If poetry has the power to relate to everything, then it has to have a function, one way or another. We all unconsciously understand this. Most people are likely to rate higher than perhaps is right writers who agree with them, and even forgive bad writers for the same reason. I certainly do this; or, at least, I often feel drawn to writers who inhabit some section of my world-view. This is just a natural fact of life, accepted and understood by Housman himself, as well as Pound and Orwell, both of whom enthusiastic social critics.18 The solution to this problem, however, is not to abandon literature, but rather to embrace it, and read more and more of it. Thus, in interpretation, we can learn from our own faults, and begin to view the world from the infinite different perspectives offered to us. “The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.”19
As I have discussed elsewhere, poetry, and literature too, is the conversion of impression into expression.20 It is to relate the specific to the universal. It is a translation, from one mental language to another. As such, nothing is perhaps as important as being a good translator—a sublime converter of ideas. Understanding poetry, not just as a vessel for ideas, but as a mode for the expression of ideas, is the goal. That is not to say that the content of the poetry is not useful to know. Didactic poetry has existed since time immemorial, whether it be Aratus, Lucretius and Manilius (of whom Housman is the authority) or even Milton, or Tennyson’s In Memoriam A. H. H, or even the Books of Psalms or Proverbs themselves. Literature certainly communicates systems of morality or scientific schools or religious messages, but these specific topics are not my quarry. Instead, it is poetry as a whole that I target, because all poetry helps us understand the relation of man to meaning, and meaning, thus also man, to society. It is not only that we know things that is important, but that we are capable of knowing things.
Understanding how to convert impression into expression is critical not only to the individual, but also to his nation, which can only function through communication. Thus writes Pound:
“If a nation’s literature declines, the nation atrophies and decays. Your legislator can’t legislate for the public good, your commander can’t command, your populace (if you be a democratic country) can’t instruct its ‘representatives’, save by language… ‘the statesman cannot govern, the scientist cannot participate his discoveries, men cannot agree on wise action without language’, and all their deeds and conditions are affected by the defects or virtues of idiom. A people that grows accustomed to sloppy writing is a people in process of losing grip on its empire and on itself. And this looseness and blowsiness is not anything as simple and scandalous as abrupt and disordered syntax. It concerns the relation of expression to meaning.”21
This is the most important function of literature: to maintain and strengthen the connection of the people to expression. How can anyone know what you mean if you scarcely know yourself? We are in an age of poverty—a poverty of language—and it is evident everywhere. Rarely nowadays do I not see an error or spelling mistake on BBC News articles. The politicians are illiterate. The Royal Society of Literature under Bernardine Evaristo is in a disgraceful state.22 Most creative institutions are captured by Americanising political tendencies that produce only second-rate swill. I read The Poetry Review and find writers who think writing egotistical confessionals only in lower-case and with a few line-breaks is good poetry—always i, i, i. Writers have a responsibility, that is, says Pound, “a definite social function exactly proportioned to their ability AS WRITERS.”23
This is not just some moral platitude, but a real, tangible responsibility that affects the world, and has affected it in the past. An example comes in the form of General Charles de Gaulle, the great twentieth-century statesman and perhaps the personification of France herself. This French personnage, who even as president read two or three books a week, and, as a boy was obsessed by the symbolist works of Verlaine and the theatre of Rostand, “whose poetic drama Cyrano de Bergerac he could recite almost in its entirety”, understood this responsibility all too well.24 After the liberation of France, hundreds of collaborators were sentenced to death, sometimes on legally dubious, emotionally-motivated charges. De Gaulle, as head of the provisional government had the power to commute these death sentences, and in 998 of the 1554 cases, including in the case of every woman and minor, did so.
When it came to famous writers, the General’s policy was especially curious. Among the many, Julian Jackson, in his masterful biography of de Gaulle, highlights the dual fates of Henri Béraud, an aggressively Anglophobic and anti-semitic journalist who supported Vichy France, but never actually worked with the Germans, and Robert Brasillach, writer and editor of the collaborationist newspaper Je suis partout, both of whom were sentenced to death. The famous writer, future Nobel laureate and passionate Gaullist François Mauriac, “increasingly uneasy with the idea of executing writers because of their opinions rather than their actions”, began to campaign for their sentences to be commuted, and lobbied de Gaulle personally on their behalf. In the case of Béraud, de Gaulle commuted the sentence, supposedly independently of Mauriac’s pressure, because in Béraud’s files he had seen no “sign of collusion with the enemy.”25
Brasillach, however, was refused by the General, even after de Gaulle received a petition from such literary greats as Claudel, Valéry, Cocteau, Colette and Camus, as well as support from Mauriac, his son Claude and a personal debate with Brasillach’s defence lawyer Jacques Isorni (the petition was opposed, however, by Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Gide and Picasso).26 He was perhaps more complicit in the Vichy regime than Béraud, but, like him, had not collaborated with the Germans in a literal sense. Jackson comments that “de Gaulle’s only comment on the affair was that ‘In literature as in everything talent confers responsibility.’ If this really was his view, it meant that one of the arguments used by Isorni and Mauriac to save Brasillach—his distinction as a writer—was actually what condemned him in de Gaulle’s eyes.”27 In light of the grave nature of such responsibility, nothing is more essential than a ‘poetic pedagogy’ that provides the possibility to the people of expressing themselves in a proper way.
This brings me, at last, to the origin of this entire article. I was first introduced to ‘Into my heart an air that kills’ on the 14th June 2012 episode of Question Time. Set in the context of Michael Gove’s reforming stint as Secretary of State for Education, during which he suggested that children should learn poetry by heart, the panel, consisting of Peter Hitchens, the current Defence Secretary Grant Shapps, a dull Tim Farron, a lecturing Emily Thornberry, and the perennially daft Greg Dyke, was asked by an audience member if any of them could “recite a poem that they learned by rote at school, and explain how this has been useful in their subsequent careers.”28 The question is, of course, itself, flawed (and totally banal)—poetry’s merit does not rest on it being ‘useful’ to one’s career, but on its own sublimity. None of the panel, of course, except for Hitchens, proffered a poem. So he, alone, recited ‘Into my heart an air that kills’, and expounded the virtues of a poetic education, which brilliantly sums up so much of what I have written here so far. It is truly astonishing that only eight lines of poetry could inspire so much. I shall leave you, finally, with Housman, and Hitchens:
“Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?
It is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
Those happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.
…
I’m very pleased that my head is full of things like that—and also lots of hymns which I remember—and I feel very sorry for anyone who hasn’t had the chance to learn them. And I think it is a great condemnation of our school system that so few people, and particularly only those whose parents are rich, can actually afford to have their children taught things like that and have their minds furnished with beauty for the remainder of their lives, and to pour scorn on it, and to say that it is unimportant, is to declare yourself a spiritual desert. Of course people need these things and, what’s more, they’re a profound part of being British. If you don’t know the literature, and the poetry, and the music of your own country, then you aren’t really, fully, conversant with its history or its character. You’ve lost touch with what your ancestors knew, and you won’t be able to pass it on to your own children and grandchildren. Of course these things should be taught. I wish Michael Gove actually had the power and the policies to make it happen. I really do think it would be a good thing. I also think that people should not—particularly teachers—should not say that these things don’t matter. They matter immensely.”29
George Orwell, Inside the Whale, section 2.
Γνῶθι σαυτόν, gnōthi sauton, was inscribed upon the Temple of Delphi, that Apollonian shrine.
Leonardo Bruni, The Study of Literature: To Lady Battista Malatesta of Montefeltro, 21.
See n.1.
Harold Bloom, How to Read and Why, p. 71.
Housman’s quote, not Bloom’s (from Wikipedia, perhaps in Peter Edgerly Firchow, Reluctant Modernists, LIT Verlag Münster 2002, pp. 7–26).
How to Read and Why, p. 71.
Paul G Methven, “Into my heart an air that kills” an analysis of this superb short ‘A Shropshire Lad’ poem by A E Housman, p. 5. Note, I found this after I wrote my analysis. He also never mentions Bloom, even though his idea of the poem seems closely modelled on Bloom’s interpretation, with certain differences.
A. E. Housman, “The Name and Nature of Poetry”, in: A. E. Housman, A Shropshire Lad and Other Poems, p. 235.
How to Read and Why, p. 71.
Housman, p. 238.
In: Housman, p. 238.
Housman, p. 240
Housman, p. 249.
Housman, p. 255.
Housman, p. 255.
Housman, “The Name and Nature of Poetry” (as above), p. 247. Orwell on Housman, Inside the Whale: “Housman stood for a kind of bitter, defiant paganism, a conviction that life is short and the gods are against you, which exactly fitted the prevailing mood of the young; and all in charming fragile verse that was composed almost entirely of words of one syllable. There are a number of his poems (‘Into my heart an air that kills’, for instance, and ‘Is my team ploughing?’) that are not likely to remain long out of favour. But at bottom it is always a writer’s tendency, his ‘purpose’, his ‘message’, that makes him liked or disliked. The proof of this is the extreme difficulty of seeing any literary merit in a book that seriously damages your deepest beliefs. And no book is ever truly neutral. Some or other tendency is always discernible, in verse as much as in prose, even if it does no more than determine the form and the choice of imagery. But poets who attain wide popularity, like Housman, are as a rule definitely gnomic writers.” Pound, ABC of Reading, p. 32: “Partisans of particular ideas may value writers who agree with them more than writers who do not, they may, and often do, value bad writers ·of their own party or religion more than good writers of another party or church.”
Ecclesiastes 1:9.
ABC of Reading, p. 34.
ABC of Reading, p. 32.
Two or three books a week: Julian Jackson, A Certain Idea of France: The Life of Charles de Gaulle, p. 711; reading Verlaine and Rostard in his youth: Jackson, p. 17.
Jackson, p. 343.
Jackson, p. 343.
Jackson, p. 345.