A. E. Housman

A E Housman’s 1896 assembly of sixty-three poems, A Shropshire Lad, over time, has delighted many readers and listeners. The enigmatic poem, "Into my heart an air that kills", has proved especially captivating; its theme of the poet’s nostalgic recollection of a happy childhood, coincides with many people’s own memories of their youth. An unusually short, two-stanza work, this stunning poem comprises just eight lines, and forty-six words. This paper analyses the poem – its meaning, its structure, its vocabulary, its perplexities – and some critical reactions. It also determines what the purpose of the poem isn’t as well as establishing its rationale and intent.

The present paper seeks to address and examine Edward FitzGerald’s globally-known poem afterlife, The Rubáiyát. Translation can serve as a force for literary renewal and innovation. For many years translation was regarded as a marginal area within comparative studies, now it is acknowledged that translation has played a vital role in literary history and great periods of literary innovation tend to be preceded by periods of intense translation activity. The significance of FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát lies in how the poem was read when it appeared and in the precise historical moment when it was published. The impact of FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát was such that on the one hand it served as a model for a new generation of poets struggling to make the skepticism and pessimism a proper subject for poetry, while on the other hand it established a benchmark for future translators because it set the parameters in the minds of English-language readers of what Persian poetry could do. The present chapter tries to show that FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát had a role in forming pre-modern English poetry, notably Housman’s poetry, in terms of form and content. Housman’s A Shropshire Lad and FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát have undeniable similarities.

Halperin, David M. (1990). «Introduction». En: One hundred years of homosexuality and other essays on Greek love. New York: Routledge, pp. 1-12. Traducción realizada por Gabriela Marrón, para uso interno de la cátedra de Cultura Clásica del Departamento de Humanidades de la Universidad Nacional del Sur

Review of “Alfred E. Housman, L’applicazione del pensiero alla critica del testo, A cura di L. Battezzato, con estratti inediti dal Notebook X e uno scritto di G.B. Conte, Edizioni della Normale, Pisa 2021”, «Classical Review» 72, 2022, 749-750

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.

The poems of Catullus barely managed to survive the Middle Ages. All surviving copies of the collection derive from an extremely corrupt manuscript, and scholars have been working since the Renaissance to reconstruct the original text. This volume aims to contribute to this effort. Its six authors represent different generations of scholarship and of academic tradition. They here study aspects of the manuscript tradition of the poems and their editorial history as well as contributing directly to the reconstruction of the text. The volume aims to set an example of a collaborative approach to textual criticism, in which significant choices are based not on the judgement of a single authoritative editor, but on the outcome of debate between scholars who represent a broad range of viewpoints.

The Sapphic poem Bergk 52 (= Frag. Adesp. 976 Page) was translated, more and less freely, three times by A. E. Housman. … Housman chose to compose three different versions of this one Sapphic poem, one of which he published before his beloved's death, and that the one essential common denominator in all four poems is: "I lie alone."