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This lecture discusses some of the different ways in which a tussle between reticence and release is played out in A. E. Housman's verse. It can be found in allusions that turn individual lines into miniature models of human relations and in its sceptical attention to commonplaces and bits of received wisdom, to name a few. The lecture also shows how the personal and cultural circumstances of Housman's poetry provoked him into the creation of an imagined alternative, which is a world where his unlucky love would be able to find an answer.

This chapter explores Murray's relationship with men who were in many ways very different from him, but who, like him combined academic distinction with a wider public reputation. Housman can be compared to Murray, who like him was a professional classical scholar who engaged with a wider public through poetry; but was unlike him both in his austere textual criticism and in his often savage reviewing of other scholars. Similarly Russell, who moved in social and intellectual circles which overlapped Murray's, and like Murray he was a liberal in politics, but had a very different mindset. In both cases, the maintenance of the relationship involved a continuing tension between distinct emotional patterns and world-views.

This chapter analyses A. E. Housman’s Praefanda, a parallel for Bainbrigge’s subversive, witty, and allusive Latin. Sexuality and scholarship cannot be separated; this chapter deconstructs the popular stereotype of the divided Housman, whose romantic poetry touched on homoerotic desires, but who focused his scholarly energies on austere topics. Housman’s Latin demonstrates complex intertextuality with classical literature and neo-Latin writings on sex, and it teases his readers about his knowledge of sex and sexuality, and how that knowledge was gained; like Bainbrigge, he suggests that sexual knowledge cannot be separated from the body, and focuses on a range of sexual pleasures, many of which have been overlooked in classical scholarship. Praefanda has much in common with Housman’s homoerotic verses, but its liberated Latin also contains Housman’s most outspoken comments about sexuality ancient and modern, and offers an important challenge to conventional sexual morality.

This chapter examines one of the most popular critical frames for the English pastoral: the representation of nature. While older rural pastoral signifiers (such as the evocation of birdsong) persist in English compositions written after 1900, many composers engaged with the pastoral through A. E. Housman’s poetic anthology A Shropshire Lad. Musical depictions of the British landscape also appear beyond the West Country, whether as existentially bleak meditations on man’s ephemeral relationship with nature, or in explorations of the tensions between the industrialized modern city and the idealized rural village, especially as experienced by the populations caught between.

The chapter discusses the extremely limited information we possess about the author Manilius and gives a brief history of the reception of his poem, from Gerbert d'Aurillac to Poggio Bracciolini to A. E. Housman. It also discusses the methodology adopted in the book as a whole: in light of our lack of knowledge about the historical Manilius, the work employs a contextual approach, attempting to illuminate Manilius' poem with reference to its intellectual background. By examining the manifold intellectual traditions that have gone into shaping the Astronomica, the book aims at painting a picture of the cultural imagination of the Early Empire and at determining the place of Manilius within his scientific, historical, literary, and philosophical context.

The use of genealogies in Hollinghurst’s narratives evokes the influence of the past on his characters, and proposes an explanation of their actions. But Hollinghurst’s genealogical stories are paradoxical and eccentric. They evoke origins in order to reject them. In The Folding Star the search for origins, or any reliance on their claim to be explanatory, becomes a wild goose chase. In The Spell the characters cling to their histories, yet they need to let them go. The necessity, shown in both novels, is fraught because what must be rejected is the gay genealogy of the present. The gay present consequently faces a future unmoored from its past. Hollinghurst’s work is caught up in a conflict similar to his characters.’ His novels evoke the influence of A. E. Housman, Ronald Firbank, Thomas Hardy, and Gordon Bottomley—an eccentric grouping of modernist era writers. They constitute a genealogical origin and explanation of Hollinghurst’s place in literary history. Yet the content or the form of the work of those authors implies the need for dissociation from generative origins. They are hollow auguries of what is to come. It is the hollowness of history that genealogies in Hollinghurst’s novels emphasize most.

This chapter presents an overview of the music Blitzstein wrote from 1924-1929, years of early maturity. This body of work includes settings of poetry by A. E. Housman and Walt Whitman; a score to the German experimental film Hände; and a musical farce, Triple-Sec, to a libretto by Ronald Jeans that eventually played on Broadway in one of the Garrick Gaieties.

This chapter explores the impact of the new theory of metonymy on critical practice in various fields. The first of three case studies breaks new ground in translation criticism by assessing what happens to metonymy in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century translations of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon into German (by Jenisch, Humboldt, Droysen, Wilamowitz-Möllendorff) and English (Browning). It renders visible previously unrecognized translation strategies, opens up new dimensions for comparing literary translations, and challenges the conventional ‘foreignization’-versus-‘domestication’ dichotomy. The second case study offers a stylistic assessment of what constitutes the distinctive ‘hellenizing’ style in Housman’s ‘Fragment of a Greek Tragedy’ and Schiller’s The Bride of Messina, highlighting the crucial role metonymy plays in it, while the third offers a critical reappraisal of (post-)structuralist reappropriations of metonymy (by de Man, Lodge, White, and others) in the light of the new insights gained here and formulates parameters for best practice in structuralist analysis and inter-arts criticism.

This chapter offers a brief survey of the reception of the Odes from Horace’s own time to the present, with a focus on literary reception and, for the period since the Renaissance, on material in English. Topics discussed include translations and adaptations of the Odes, expurgated editions, and the status of Horace as a moral guide in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain. Poems treated include Ben Jonson’s “Ode to Himself,” Andrew Marvell’s “Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland,” A. E. Housman’s “On Wenlock Edge,” W. H. Auden’s “The Horatians,” and Seamus Heaney’s reworking of Odes 1.34, “Anything Can Happen,” with its reference to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.