{"id":56,"date":"2005-10-04T23:04:18","date_gmt":"2005-10-05T03:04:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/63.247.138.2\/~curculio\/?p=56"},"modified":"2005-10-04T23:38:19","modified_gmt":"2005-10-05T03:38:19","slug":"footnote-to-housman","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/curculio.org\/?p=56","title":{"rendered":"Johnson On Housman"},"content":{"rendered":"

From Charles Johnston, Selected Poems<\/i> (London, 1985):<\/p>\n

\n

Footnote to Housman<\/b><\/p>\n

To reach the top flight as a poet
\nyou must write an unreadable work,
\nso obscure that your friends will forgo it
\nand all but the bravest will shirk.<\/p>\n

Then the few who have read it, begrudging
\nthe waste of exertion entailed,
\nwill claim it’s essential for judging
\nhow far you’ve succeeded or failed.<\/p>\n

From admiring their own persistence
\nthey’ll come to admiring the screed
\nand claim that it stands at a distance
\nfrom works that are easy to read;<\/p>\n

while the reader who skipped it is able
\nto pretend he enjoyed it himself,
\nand leave it about on his table,
\nand show it with pride on his shelf.<\/p>\n

It was Housman who worst neglected
\nthe force of this critical rule,
\nwith result that his faults are detected
\nby infants who read him at school,<\/p>\n

while we who admire him, defenceless,
\nlack some pompier<\/i> twaddle to quote
\nand can find nothing prolix or senseless
\nto claim as the best thing he wrote.<\/p>\n

To learn from the fault he committed
\nis the first of poetical cares.
\nLucid intervals may be admitted,
\nbut be lucid the whole time who dares.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I suspect that Johnston chose the limericious meter to reflect his anti-pretentious meaning. In the second-to-last stanza, ‘pompier’ is a pompous (and French) word for ‘pompous’.<\/p>\n

(An hour or two later: I’d forgotten that I’d already posted this on July 28th, 2003, but I suppose it’s worth a second look.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From Charles Johnston, Selected Poems (London, 1985): Footnote to Housman To reach the top flight as a poet you must write an unreadable work, so obscure that your friends will forgo it and all but the bravest will shirk. Then … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[79,73],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-56","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture-poetry","category-nachleben"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/curculio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/curculio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/curculio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/curculio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/curculio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=56"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/curculio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/curculio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=56"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/curculio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=56"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/curculio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=56"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}