Laudator Temporis Acti

Rachel Hadas, Teaching The Iliad:

Teaching the text, I feel
the little hairs along my forearms rise
and shield my eyes
against the nimble letters on the page.
They spell a man
who weeps and weeps alone
for his brief golden age.
Presently the line where sea meets sky
fills with silhouetted men. An army
deployed behind him comes between
margin and horizon like a screen
on which hexameters drum down like rain.

A.E. Housman, The Name and Nature of Poetry:

Poetry indeed seems to me more physical than intellectual. A year or two ago, in common with others, I received from America a request that I would define poetry. I replied that I could no more define poetry than a terrier can define a rat, but that I thought we both recognised the object by the symptoms which it provokes in us. One of these symptoms was described in connexion with another object by Eliphaz the Temanite: 'A spirit passed before my face: the hair of my flesh stood up'. Experience has taught me, when I am shaving of a morning, to keep watch over my thoughts, because, if a line of poetry strays into my memory, my skin bristles so that the razor ceases to act. This particular symptom is accompanied by a shiver down the spine; there is another which consists in a constriction of the throat and a precipitation of water to the eyes; and there is a third which I can only describe by borrowing a phrase from one of Keats’s last letters, where he says, speaking of Fanny Brawne, 'everything that reminds me of her goes through me like a spear'. The seat of this sensation is the pit of the stomach.

Hat tip: Patrick Kurp.