A. E. Housman om religiös poesi

En klassikerblogg måste vid åtminstone något tillfälle nämna Housman. Jag kunde sålunda i den glamorösa bloggarstilen berätta om hur jag för några år sedan tog en drink i The Housman Room, University College London, med en professor och en amerikansk gästföreläsare, och där diskuterade Tom Stoppards nyskrivna housmanpjäs. Jag kunde i samma veva nämna att Göran Hägg för något år sedan skrev en roman löst baserad på Housmans liv, som han gjorde om till svensk akademiledamot. Eller så kunde jag i den nördiga bloggarstilen säga något om den text av Housman som vi obotliga nördar som läser grekiska tragedier på originalspråk rullar på golvet skrattande åt.

Kanske jag återkommer till detta. Här är istället ett stycke ur Housmans föreläsning The Name and Nature of Poetry, The Leslie Stephen Lecture 1933. Citat ur boken med samma namn, utgiven i Cambridge samma år, s. 33-37:

If a man is insensible to poetry, it does not follow that he gets no pleasure from poems. Poems very seldom consist of poetry and nothing else; and pleasure can be derived also from their other ingredients. I am convinced that most readers, when they think that they are admiring poetry, are deceived by inability to analyse their sensations, and that they are really admiring, not the poetry of the passage before them, but something else in it, which they like better than poetry.

To begin with a very obvious instance. I have been told by devout women that to them the most beautiful poetry is Keble’s. Keble is a poet; there are things in the Christian Year which can be admired by atheists; but what devout women most prize in it, as Keble himself would have wished, is not its poetry; and I much doubt whether any of them, if asked to pick out the best poem in the book, would turn at once to the Second Sunday after Easter. Good religious poetry, whether in Keble or Dante or Job, is likely to be most justly appreciated and most discriminately relished by the undevout.

Again, there existed in the last century a great body of Wordsworthians, as they were called. It is now much smaller; but true appreciation of Wordsworth’s poetry has not diminished in proportion: I suspect that it has much increased. The Wordsworthians, as Matthew Arnold told them, were apt to praise their poet for the wrong things. They were most attracted by what may be called his philosophy; they accepted his belief in the morality of the universe and the tendency of events to good; they were even willing to entertain his conception of nature as a living and sentient and benignant being, a conception as purely mythological as the Dryads and the Naiads. To that thrilling utterance which pierces the heart and brings tears to the eyes of thousands who care nothing for his opinions and beliefs they were not noticeably sensitive; and however justly they admired the depth of his insight into human nature and the nobility of his moral ideas, these things, with which his poetry was in close and harmonious alliance, are distinct from poetry itself.

When I examine my mind and try to discern clearly in the matter, I cannot satisfy myself that there are any such things as poetical ideas. No truth, it seems to me, is too precious, no observation too profound, and no sentiment too exalted to be expressed in prose. The utmost that I could admit is that some ideas do, while others do not, lend themselves kindly to poetical expression; and that these receive from poetry an enhancement which glorifies and almost transfigures them, and which is not perceived to be a separate thing by analysis.

‘Whosoever will save his life shall lose it, and whosoever will lose his life shall find it.’ That is the most important truth which has ever been uttered, and the greatest discovery ever made in the moral world; but I do not find in it anything which I should call poetical. On the other hand, when Wisdom says in the Proverbs ‘He that sinneth against me wrongeth his own soul; all they that hate me, love death’, that is to me poetry, because of the words in which the idea is clothed; and as for the seventh verse of the forty-ninth Psalm in the Book of Common Prayer, ‘But no man may deliver his brother, nor make agreement unto God for him’, that is to me poetry so moving that I can hardly keep my voice steady in reading it. And that this is the effect of language I can ascertain by experiment: the same thought in the bible version, ‘None of them can by any means redeem his brother, nor give to God a ransom for him’, I can read without emotion.