Housman's Poems.

Publication: The Journal of English and Germanic Philology

Publication Date: 01-APR-94

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COPYRIGHT 1994 University of Illinois Press

By John Bayley. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992. Pp. vi + 202. $49.95.

This exasperating book is obligatory reading because anything written by John Bayley in his field is obligatory reading, but the book is exasperating nevertheless.

Here a refined and educated critical sensibility encounters a poet elusive and enigmatic despite the apparently lucid surfaces of his verse, and the effect is that of solution, the poet dissolved in the critical sensibility, the poet increasingly diluted and alloyed as the commentary progresses, and remaining still elusive and enigmatic at the end.

A number of ideas are awash, loosely conveying something of a view of the kind of poet Housman is and of how his poems work. According to...

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