A E Housman
Quotations

"Nature, not content with denying him the ability to think, has endowed him with the ability to write."

 

"I believe that every English poet should read the English classics, master the rules of grammar before he attempts to bend or break them, travel abroad, experience the horrors of sordid passion, and - if he is lucky enough - know the love of an honest woman."

 

"Good religious poetry . . . is likely to be most justly appreciated and most discriminately relished by the undevout."

 

"Even when poetry has a meaning, as it usually has, it may be inadvisable to draw it out . . . Perfect understanding will sometimes almost extinguish pleasure."

 

"Great literature should do some good to the reader: must quicken his perception though dull, and sharpen his discrimination though blunt, and mellow the rawness of his personal opinions."

 

"Statistics in the hands of an engineer are like a lamppost to a drunk -- they're used more for support than illumination. "

 

"Poetry is independent of meaning, a kind of ravishing nonsense."

 

"Poetry: Melody addressed to the inner chambers of the sense of hearing, to the junction between the ear and the brain."

 

"The house of delusions is cheap to build but drafty to live in."

 

"Poetry is not the thing said, but the way of saying it."

 

"Experience has taught me, when I am shaving of a morning, to keep watch over my thoughts, because if a line of poetry strays into my memory, my skin bristles so that the razor ceases to act...The seat of this sensation is the pit of the stomach."

 

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