“I could no more define poetry than a terrier can define a rat.” — A.E.Housman | V2Melody

“I could no more define poetry than a terrier can define a rat.”

Suggesting that poetry may be recognised instinctively without being definable · Lecture, The Name and Nature of Poetry, 1933

About A.E.Housman

A.E.Housman

26 March 1859–30 April 1936

Alfred Edward Housman was born on 26 March 1859 at Valley House, Fockbury, a small hamlet near Bromsgrove in Worcestershire, England, and died in Cambridge on 30 April 1936. He became, by way of an unusually divided life, both one of the most recognizable lyric poets in English and one of the most formidable classical…

More by A.E.Housman

Poems by A.E.Housman

More remarks by A.E.Housman

“Kings have long abdicated that province; and we students are come into their inheritance: it is our honour to search out the things which God has concealed.”

Giving scholarship the adventurous dignity once associated with kingship · Introductory Lecture, University College London, 1892

“I think that to transfuse emotion, not to transmit thought but to set up in the reader's sense a vibration corresponding to what was felt by the writer, is the peculiar function of poetry.”

Defining poetry as the transmission of felt experience between writer and reader · Lecture, The Name and Nature of Poetry, 1933

“The literary faculty of classical scholars is poor, and sometimes worse.”

A characteristically unsparing judgement on his own profession · Introductory Lecture, University College London, 1892