Broken Oars University Summer Shorts Series: A. E. Housman: Classicist Buttons up to Deal with Unrequited Passion and Invents England. As You Do ... - a podcast by brokenoarspodcast

from 2023-05-17T17:00

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Welcome back to Episode Two of Broken Oars Summer Shorts Series - the book club for rowers where no books about rowing are discussed ...

(And that's a promise ... ).

Instead, to fill the golden dawns and endless twilights of summer, we're taking a whirl through some poets and poetry, leavened with the odd observation about the things that the Northern One used to know about before Covid and Long Covid bollocksed his brain: culture, history, why everything is an art, why artists are as full of crap as the rest of us, self-narration, why squaring early helps with developing a good catch ...

You know ...

Bowsider stuff.

In this episode, following on from our first episode deep dive into Thomas Hardy (and yes, we know: a deep dive into a native of Dorset is not a thing to be taken likely. We speak from experience when it comes to that, but it can be very rewarding, especially if you like rough scrumpy and cold sea swimming as the sun comes up. No, these are not metaphors ... ) we get stuck into the life and work of A. E. Housman.

A late-Victorian Classicist who caught the uneasy mood of late-nineteenth century Britain, Housman's first collection, A Shropshire Lad, appears, on the surface, to reflect the beliefs of his era: the vigour and promise of youth; that England's authentic spirit is held in her landscapes, particularly those of her countryside; and that perhaps something eternal and intrinsic has been lost in Britain's race to invent the modern world.

All of those themes are there, of course. The late-Victorian period is, after all, when the Victorian's literary obsession with little girls as symbols of purity and innocence gives way to celebrating young boys and men - fittingly enough in a culture that suggested that martial prowess had won Britain the empire.

But there is a deeper, resonant melancholy in Housman's work. On one level, this reflects the then-held sense that although British Imperial power had never been greater, there was a feeling that the best had past; that the only way to fulfil youthful promise was to die young and enshrine its potential rather see that potential failed to live up to; that something, indeed, had been lost.

On the other, it speaks more potently of Housman's own unrequited passion for a fellow male undergraduate; what he felt he had lost; that the golden promise of his own youth as manifested in those feelings had not been realised for all his professional success. From this perspective, the landscapes of the blue-remembered hills, read as England's lost pastoral spirit remaining in the land by some, are actually the internal landscapes of the heart, and what Housman himself had lost.

Sounds weird? Yeah. The Victorians were, as the youth of today say, completely mental. So pull up a chair, get a glass of something cold and good, or hot and steaming, and let's dive into an object lesson of how they might be our ancestors but they might as well be aliens for all we have in common with them.

Except for the idea that Britain's best days are behind her - that one's a hardy perennial thrown out regularly by everyone from scoundrel politicos to offshore press barons alike. Plus ca change, eh ... ?

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