The Manuscript Poems. by A. E. HousmanReview by: Frederick L. GwynnModern Language Notes, Vol. 71, No. 1 (Jan., 1956), pp. 52-54Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3043721 .

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sometimes dull recital of movements and dates, visits without point and episodes lacking in significance. To this extent the author has been the victim of his own thoroughness, though he assures the reader that his pruning has reduced the length of the book by nearly fifty per cent.

On the whole, however, a picture of Landor as a fascinating but difficult personality, irascible and kindly, vain and penetratingly astute, childlike in his gullibility and quixotic in his attacks upon what he considered tyranny or injustice - appears here in this restrained narrative more convincingly than in the impressionistic interpretations of Forster. Professor Super has not thrown much new light on Landor's love affairs or his family troubles, his friendship with Dickens or with Browning, but he has viewed them in perspective, and he has fortified with concrete evidence Elwin's distrust of Forster.

If the account of Landor's literary productions appears to lean heavily on pedestrian summaries, it is because the biographer has not assumed the critic and has been concerned mainly with relating his subject's literary activity to his life. The importance of literature to Landor is everywhere made apparent. And the degree to which the classics governed his whole outlook is subtly stressed in the statement that " Landor's sharpest thrust " against a barrister who had insulted him " was the suggestion that his man could not read Latin."

Rutgers University LESLIE A. MARCHAND

A. E. Housman, The Manuscript Poems, ed. Tom Burns Haber (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1955. xiv + 146 pp. $4.50). POOR Housman! His scholar's care for his poetic core (" it is best that what I have written should be printed while I am here to see it through the press and control its spelling and punctuation ") was in vain, and his husbanding of a meagre productivity has inevitably been betrayed. Where another generation read the first and " last " pub- lished poems of the Shropshire lad and murmured, " Few, but roses," our studious contemporaries may be put off by More Poems, Additional Poems, and Manuscript Poems-not to mention the biography of a pathetic man who might seem, in the words of Auden's acid sonnet, to have "Kept tears like dirty postcards in a drawer." In short, the glamor and uniqueness of Housman's two books have been tarnished-not by re-reading, in spite of critical sniping from Garrod

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to Connolly-but by the discovery of how sterile his life was, and how unusual it was for him to write as well as he did for a short while in the 1890's.

The latter discovery is partly the result of Professor Ilaber's edition of 136 hitherto unpublished snippets of verse in Housman's four MS. notebooks, the tables that Housman had already used for his own publication, and that his brother and others had rifled for everything printed after Last Poems. These Notebooks, now in the Library of Congress, have been restored from the mutilation Laurence Housman felt his brother's will constrained him to perform, and they still con- tain " usable drafts " of nine-tenths of the Collected Poems. " It will be many years," Haber says elsewhere, " before the usefulness of the collection is fully assayed."

The basis of Haber's claim lies in his belief that the Notebooks, whose original order and contents he has reconstructed, "contain many of the essential records, plus a wealth of minutiae equally im- portant to the student of the poet's way. These records . . . at the same time enable us to correct several long-standing misconceptions- some of them planted by A. E. H. himself." Students of Housman's craftsmanship will indeed be enlightened by the early drafts of lines and stanzas (Part III of Haber's book), which show almost without exception how the poet's final phrasing made the earlier alternatives sound synthetic: for example, the difference between "Wake: the vaulted shadow shatters " and " Wake; the axe of morning shatters," etc., or between " Shot? so quick, so clean an ending? " and " Nine- teen! so quick and clean an ending?" Students will also appreciate ilaber's footnotes to the Fragments themselves (Part II) showing the ultimate disposition of detached phrases and lines, although one may feel that he has missed a colorful quatrain written in January 1895 (p. 52) that resembles the magnificent epigram Housman was to compose two decades later, the " Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries."

Apart from this utilitarian information about diction and structure, the most interesting thing in the book is Haber's discovery that, con- trary to Housman's famous statement that he wrote most o- A Shrop- shire Lad " in the early months of 1895," the poet had actually pro- duced about one-third of it before that year and was to write another one-third after those months; furthermore, it is September 1890 that " marks the start of the ' continuous excitement ' that produced " the memorable little book. Even Housman's statement about Last Poems, that " About a quarter of this matter belongs to April of the present

vOL. ixXI, January 1956 53

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year" (1922) seems to be exaggeration: that one-seventh "belongs to the present year" (his rejected phrase though not his figure) is probably nearer the truth.

Haber's work comprises, in short, a short, good book. Not only are the binding, printing, and jacket as clean as a ilousman lyric, but Haber's writing is unobtrusive without being dull. It is not easy to summarize statistics in as lively a fashion as one finds on, say, pp. 28-29, or to keep one's bibliographical balance so adroitly as in the amusing footnote to pp. 133-134. It is good to learn that Haber, who has been milking this material in a number of articles and notes since 1951, is working on a definitive edition of Housman's collected poems. To have all the readings-and writings-in one place will focus the reader's eye on the achievements of the completed poetry, and will hold up once again A. E. H.'s still-defended challenge-cup.

Univer8ity of Virginia FREDERICK L. GWYNN

E. Hilda Dale, La Poesie franCaise en Angleterre, 1850-1890, sa fortune et son influence (Paris: Marcel Didier, 1954. 145 pp.). SINCE A. J. Farmer's monograph, Le Mouvement esthetique et decadent en Angleterre, 1873-1900, considers in some detail the impact of French poetry on English writers of the 1880's, E. Hilda Dale feels free to pass over these " aesthetic " years when verse and other forms of what Tennyson called "poisonous honey stolen from France" exerted the clearest and most demonstrable attraction. The title of her study is therefore a bit misleading. Though she has something to say of the shifting reputation of the French poets throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, her central emphasis falls on a rather limited area of actual " influence," the relation of Theodore deBanville's work and theory to the poetic practice of Austin Dobson and his friends. Her most valid conclusions reinforce the argument of J. K. Robinson's admirable article, "A Neglected Phrase of the Aesthetic Movement: English Parnassianism" (PAILA, LXVIII [1953], 733-754), which appeared while her book was in the press.

Professor Dale's climax, however, proves a bit anti-climactic, for her study has a broad initial imnpulse, and it ranges over poets of far greater significance than either Banville or Dobson. It begins with a rapid survey of the larger hostilities-social and political, as well as literary between England and France in the 'fifties and

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