Laudator Temporis Acti

From The Letters of A.E. Housman, Volume II. Edited by Archie Burnett (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007):

P. 5 (to Alice Rothenstein, January 16, 1927):

Your story about the sycamores is just like what has happened in the Woodchester valley. On the east side there used to be a belt of beeches half way up the hill, dividing the downs from the fields, and making a piece of scenery which was in its way as beautiful as anything anywhere; and now the greater part of them are down and the whole look of the place changed.

P. 6 (to J.W. Mackail, January 20, 1927):

Virgil's besetting sin is the use of words too forcible for his thoughts.

P. 48 (to Basil Housman, December 29, 1927):

I had a visit not long ago from Clarence Darrow, the great American barrister for defending murderers. He had only a few days in England, but he could not retun home without seeing me, because he had so often used my poems to rescue his clients from the electric chair. Loeb and Leopold owe their life sentence partly to me; and he gave me a copy of his speech, in which, sure enough, two of my poems are misquoted.

Pp. 111-112 (to Laurence Housman, February 16, 1929):

The financial expert who reorganised Grant Richards' business for his creditors thought he would like to read A Shropshire Lad. He did, or as much as he could; then, in his own words, 'I put it behind the fire. Filthiest book I ever read: all about rogering girls under hedges.'

P. 121 (to Jeannie Housman, April 3, 1929):

Many thanks for your kind attempt to cheer the gloom of a seventieth birthday.

Pp. 153-154 (to Arnold Rubin, November 17, 1929):

Assuming that you have to earn your living, I advise you to follow chemistry or any other honest trade rather than literature, which, as Scott said, may be a good walking-stick, but is a bad crutch. It cannot be depended on. Maurice Hewlett, when his novels were selling well, threw up a post in the Civil Service, intending to live by his pen; the public ceased to read his novels, and he died in poverty. And of all forms of literature, poetry is the straightest way to starvation. There is one living poet who boasts that he lives on the proceeds of his poetry, but he is a bad one. Moreover poetry is not a job to fill all one's time, and poets like Wordsworth and Byron, who were always writing, would have done better to write less.

P. 233 (to I.R. Brussel):

I find it a trouble to invent titles for poems, and do not think it worth while.

P. 247 (to Charles Wilson, June 4, 1931):

Class is a real thing: we may wish that it were not, and we may pretend that it is not, but I find that it is.

P. 248 (to Harold Wilensky, June 6, 1931):

Anything is better than trusting to literature for a livelihood; and if I had tried it I should have starved. I earned my bread by teaching. I did not enjoy it, and some of my pupils in London did not care for anything beyond passing examinations.

P. 284 (to Cyril Clemens, March 4, 1932):

I do not kow why Americans are so fond of writing—and apparently of reading—about personal matters; but it seems to be a national characteristic, and it makes me unwilling to meet them, though they are always so kindly and friendly.

P. 302 (to F.H. Fobes, June 24, 1932):

The reform most needed in Greek type, now that the double sigma has been got rid of, seems to me to be the abolition of the subscript iota and the substitution, not simply of the adscript, which often causes ambiguity, but of the diminished adscript, as in Porson's last edition of the Hecuba.

P. 329 (to Maurice Pollet, February 5, 1933):

'Reader of the Greek Anthology' is not a good name for me. Of course I have read it, or as much of it as is worth reading, but with no special heed; and my favourite Greek poet is Aeschylus....I respect the Epicureans more than the Stoics, but I am myself a Cyreniac.

P. 337 (to Cyril Clemens, March 26, 1933):

Thank you for sending me your delightful Josh Billings, Yankee Humorist, which I found interesting reading. I had heard of, and enjoyed, the inimitable humor of Artemus Ward, but Josh Billings was new to me, and I am indebted to you for making such a robust and characteristic Yankee known to me. I have always been interested in American humour.

P. 341 (to Grant Richards, April 22, 1933):

I strictly enjoin you to tell Miss Shirley Pratt nothing. The sham education given at American Universities has resulted in my receiving about half-a-dozen similar enquiries fom its victims.

P. 406 (to A.S.F. Gow, February 12, 1934):

As the meaning of a poem is what it conveys, not anything else which its author may or may not have wished it to convey, I don't think that this poem, considered as a whole, has a meaning. It sems to be a rather random assemblage of pretty words, or words which he thinks pretty, without much to express but a vague agitation of mind.

P. 453 (to Katherine Symons, December 3, 1934):

I can bear my life, but I do not at all want it to go on, and it is a great mistake that it did not come to an end a year and a half ago. This period has been a serious subtraction from the total pleasure (such as it was) of my existence.

P. 528 (to Houston Martin, March 22, 1936):

In philosophy I am a Cyreniac or egoistic hedonist, and regard the pleasure of the moment as the only possible motive of action. As for pessimism, I think it almost as silly, though not as wicked, as optimism. George Eliot said she was a meliorist: I am a pejorist.

Related post: Excerpts from Housman's Letters.