From kolb@ucla.edu Sat Apr 14 13:02:04 2001
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Date: Sat, 14 Apr 2001 13:03:13 -0700
To: classics@u.washington.edu
From: Jack Kolb <kolb@ucla.edu>
Subject: Fwd: Re: A. E. Housman as scholarly reviewer
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[Thought the list might appreciate this, from one of the finer scholars on 
VICTORIA.  JK]

>Date: Tue, 10 Apr 2001 09:47:37 -0400
>From: Patrick Scott <SCOTTP@GWM.SC.EDU>
>Subject: Re: A. E. Housman as scholarly reviewer
>Sender: VICTORIA 19th-Century British Culture & Society
>  <VICTORIA@LISTSERV.INDIANA.EDU>
>To: VICTORIA@LISTSERV.INDIANA.EDU
>Reply-to: VICTORIA 19th-Century British Culture & Society
>  <VICTORIA@LISTSERV.INDIANA.EDU>
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>I have often greatly admired Housman's poetry, and taken a no-doubt 
>suspect pleasure in the savagery of his more-accessible scholarly 
>writings--which used to be easily obrained in a CUP paperback.  What 
>disturbs me however, and even colours my admiration for his poetry, is the 
>effect (a chilling effect, as they would now say, or would it be 
>freezing?) that his undoubted verbal brilliance had on the life of his 
>luckless targets.   I'm thinking of the late H.W.Garrod, for some sixty 
>years fellow of Merton College, Oxford, professor of poetry in the 1930s, 
>and Charles Eliot Norton lecturer at Harvard, editor of Keats, critic of 
>Arnold (also of course professor of poetry), author of The Religion of All 
>Good Men (1909), and of essays collected as Genius Loci; there's a 
>plangent account of Garrod by his student John Jones (also fellow of 
>Merton and professor of poetry) in the Proceedings of the British 
>Academy.  Garrod as a young classicist published an edition of Manilius, 
>Bk V, when Housman (who had himself edited then only Bks i and II) thought 
>he held the patent on Manilius.  Housman reviewed Garrod with the 
>scholarly equivalent of nuclear warfare, and Garrod turned from classics 
>to the less rigorous field of literary studies (Jack would put grin 
>here).  Was it a waste? Or a fortunate fall (grimace)? There are people 
>who only know Garrod's work because Housman attacked him (like the 
>references to e.g. Bentley or Birch in the Dunciad).  Or was Housman 
>himself one of the forces that prevented classical scholarship maintaining 
>its cultural centrality through the early twentieth century, till few of 
>his readers could catch the resonances that give density to those brief 
>lyrics? In a sense the identity of scholarship *was* antithetical, not to 
>his own poetic achievement but to the organic cultural development of an 
>appreciative readership.
>Could man be drunk for ever
>With liquor, love, or fights,
>Lief would he rise at morning,
>And lief lie down at nights.
>
>But men at whiles are sober,
>And think by fits and starts,
>And when they think they fasten
>Their hands upon their hearts.
>
>Patrick Scott
>scottp@gwm.sc.edu
>

.