Talk:A Shropshire Lad

Poem LXII, "Terence, this is stupid stuff"

I'm not sure I agree that it is the poet asking for "a tune to dance to". The first seven stanzas are a critique aimed at the poet and the following paragraphs are the poet's response saying, in essence, if joy and happiness are what you're after, stop looking to poetry. You should instead, according to the poet, drink. Kidigus 00:12, 20 March 2007 (UTC)

Synopsis

Eebahgum has quite rightly asked for a discussion of the synopsis that I removed from Alfred Edward Housman. I'm surprised, looking back, that I didn't try to justify this on the talk page at the time. I can only say that since another user had criticised me for restoring it when it was removed by an apparent vandal, I'd regarded the issue as a matter for discussion between the two of us and foolishly didn't consider the original author. I'm grateful to Eebahgum for assuming good faith.

My main objection to the synopsis was that it re-presents a series of isolable poems as the continuous thoughts of a single character. Granting for the sake of argument that the title encourages readers to think of the poems as in the voice of a single character (Housman at one time intended to call the book The Poems of Terence Hearsay, which makes the implication clearer), the "continuous" part remains a sticking point for me. I'm honestly not familiar with published criticism of Housman's poetry, but I know that the relative significance of the poem and the book as units of meaning has been a hotly disputed issue for much Latin poetry, and one it would be wiser not to treat as obvious. It isn't obvious to me at any rate that when poem II ("Loveliest of trees...") follows poem I ("From Clee to heaven...") in the book, that the Shropshire Lad's thoughts on one topic are "after" the other or "subsequent to" it or intended by poet or character to be compared or contrasted with it. But when we summarise them one after the other in continuous prose I think we do imply something of that sort. If we write, for example, "Death awaits the soldier (III-IV), but maids are not always kind (V-VI), and the farmer also comes to the grave (VII)", that implies that the sequence of poems III-VII is intended as a contrast between three different ways of life and that taken as a whole it amounts a statement of wider-ranging pessimism than any individual poem. This may or may not be correct, but I think it's definitely an interpretation, and something that can't simply be read out of the book – not in the way that one can extract the plot from a novel to produce a synopsis.

All that said, the summaries of individual poems are pithy and interesting, and deserve more credit than I gave them before. Including the poem numbers does go some way to dealing with my concern that an original narrative is being created. Would it be an acceptable compromise to reorganise the prose synopsis into a list or table, with a one-sentence synopsis for each numbered poem? This would allow most of Eebahgum's writing to be preserved in the article, without implying (or denying) any structural units other than the numbers that are actually printed in the text. Since this is all on the A Shropshire Lad article now, I don't think the greater length required would be disproportionate. EALacey (talk) 19:14, 6 March 2008 (UTC)

Whatever the literary merits - which I do not propose to pronounce upon - I suggest that the synopsis is original work (i.e. it falls under the banner of Original Research) and as such is not permited to be included in the article. I'm not going to remove it, but it should be noted that it can be removed at any time by another editor and that re-instating it would constitute vandalism (which means the other party is not constrained by 3RR and those trying to keep it can be sanctioned). That is the admin view. I will leave it up to the editors to decide how to deal with it. LessHeard vanU (talk) 20:59, 6 March 2008 (UTC)

Thanks. Briefly to state my case, I felt that the snippets under 'Themes and Style' in the present article were insufficient guide for the person enquiring about A Shropshire Lad in Wikipedia, and that a fuller synopsis (without being an utterly exhaustive account of every poem) was needed to give a better sense of the work. It seemed to me also that the article on A E H didn't give a sufficiently clear sense of the nature of the work to the reader that never went further than that article, so I put my piece there, though I realise it really belonged here.

• As to the central point about CONTINUITY of voice through the series: the question is, was this a 'cycle' of poems or just a disconnected collection of separate poems on related themes - and are they all spoken in the same voice? As I wrote the synopsis, it seemed to me that the outline of the structure did emerge - rather more than I had ever realised in reading the poems, since one usually 'dips in' - and so I allowed what I wrote to follow the structure that revealed itself. Clearly it is not simply a narrative, but equally it does have phases, namely the youthful love, the disappointment, the fortunes of doomed youth, the recurrent suicide and ghost motifs, the exile in London, the return in longing to Shropshire, the more universal pessimism (In valleys of springs of rivers, etc), the physical return, and the closing poems 'framing' the whole, taking one back to the point of imaginative inception of poem I. These phases go in groups of poems.
• I believe the answer to this is in Housman's own statement (cited by someone in the article, but not referenced) that he was influenced by Heinrich Heine. The cycle of the poet's love, the exile theme, and the haunting all have correspondences with Heine's Lyrisches intermezzo (from which Schumann selected his Dichterliebe), and similarly not in a plain narrative but in a 'heart's journey' allegorical narrative. This idea is strongly reinforced by Heine's great exile poem Germany. A Winter's Tale (Heine): editors might like to glance at the synopsis I attempted there. Also Housman's prosody is extremely like Heine's, especially in Lyrisches intermezzo, so that one could very easily sing, for instance 'With rue my heart is laden' to the Schumann setting of Heine's 'Ich will meine Seele tauschen', without any real distortion of note-values and with complete congruity of inflection and mood. In fact several of Housman's verses fit perfectly into Schumann's Heine settings, precisely (I think) because there is a close correspondence between Housman and Heine - as Housman apparently admitted. I realise that this all smacks of OR (see Less Heard vanU comments last above), BUT, I respond to that,if Housman was admitting it, then strictly he has provided the authority for the comparison, and that is not original research.
• Your suggestion of having a separate line for every poem would mean 63 lines - which would be very long indeed, much longer than what I have written. I attempted a synopsis of that kind for Schubert's Winterreise article, which at 24 poems just about works. I think 63 would be cumbersome and would lose the point of providing a 'thumbnail sketch.' I think the problem you identify could be surmounted much more easily by the addition of a couple of introductory sentences to the synopsis explaining that the apparent sequential voice is not strictly a narrative one: and perhaps a little judicial editing of the pithy sentences.
• However, I would welcome any other suggestions, and my flawed effort is at the disposal of any editor who is willing and able to improve on it, given that some such overview probably is needed! Thanks for letting me have my say. Eebahgum (talk) 21:27, 6 March 2008 (UTC)

Since writing the above I have sightly amended the synopsis text, so as to disconnect the continuity links I had suggested between individual poems. I have also added a brief introductory statement or caveat. So far from insisting on this being retained in the form I have given it, I welcome any improvement which enlarges or betters the statement, and would like to see an alternative presentation if anyone cares to offer one. If they don't, I hope this may be considered better than nothing. Eebahgum (talk) 22:41, 6 March 2008 (UTC)

More fan page than encyclopaedic

The article does not meet WP's neutrality criteria WP:NPOV in that it fails to consider any of the large body of adverse criticism of the work. Without such coverage, it reads largely like a fan page. This impression was strengthened by the two lists of literary references which were largely without citations and in no case furthered knowledge of Housman's book. The significance of such quotations was not explained, breaching the MOS:POPCULT criteria and so making them an example of WP:LISTCRUFT. The article falls far short of encyclopaedic. In order to make a start, I have deleted the lists (including that in the lead, which is questionable and unreferenced) and will try to make coverage more succinct and comprehensive in the coming days. Mzilikazi1939 (talk) 12:41, 25 February 2017 (UTC)

Shakespeare had even more fans. So? Vaughan Pratt (talk) 05:46, 25 June 2019 (UTC)

Errors?

1. Housman's friend who suggested the title was called Pollard, not Pollett.

2. Did Lady Cynthia Asquith really translate twelve poems into Latin or Greek, as stated? It would have been very unusual for a woman to have been able to do this. I see her brother Herbert used to translate Housman, as others have done. Is there an error here? Seadowns (talk) 23:00, 1 October 2017 (UTC)

It is nowhere stated in the article that Pollett (who was an American admirer, I think) suggested a title to AEH. A source is given for the Asquith translation, look it up yourself. Mzilikazi1939 (talk) 00:08, 2 October 2017 (UTC)

Pollett - yes, this was an error, but mine.

Cynthia Asquith -- I tried to look this up, but couldn't find much. I have now made a personal enquiry to an expert on Housman translations, and if he replies I shall give the answer. Girls were seldom, if ever, taught to write Latin or Greek verses at school. I just wonder if her brother's efforts have somehow been misattributed to her. Seadowns (talk) 11:25, 2 October 2017 (UTC)

You were right; I found another reference in the Housman Newsletter 42. It was Cyril Asquith. My other source just had the initial C. But about this expert you know - the only place I could think of looking for modern-language versions of Housman was Lieder Net, where I didn't get far. If there are book or pamphlet length translations, or perhaps a substantial section in an anthology, I'd be interested to learn. Mzilikazi1939 (talk) 11:56, 2 October 2017 (UTC)

It is David Butterworth, editor of the Housman Journal. See 2011 issue online or was this your source, perhaps? I don't know if he knows about translations into modern languages. He is a classicist, of course, and much interested in verse composition into Greek and Latin. Otherwise, I am afraid I can't help. Seadowns (talk) 17:47, 2 October 2017 (UTC)

Parodies

Most of the section on parodies is not worth having, in my view. Why not confine it to the one AEH called the only good one? Seadowns (talk) 15:36, 7 February 2019 (UTC)

The interest is in the broad range of people, English and American, who wrote parodies. In addition, there are the poems, subjects and stylistic characteristics chosen for parody, which give an insight into the critical perception of Housman's work. Since Housman wrote notable parodies himself, and in one case of himself, the subject is a pertinent field of study. Sweetpool50 (talk) 19:48, 22 February 2019 (UTC)