Although Horace and Housman share fame primarily for their lyric poetry, they have rarely been discussed as a pair, and naturally so: setting aside the temporal, cultural and linguistic gulfs that stand between them, the Roman has typically been read as a jovial and candid figure, far removed from the morose and reserved Englishman. This study aims ‘to bring out unnoticed or underestimated similarities between the two’ (ix), a synthetic task that is rendered more feasible by restricting Horace's poetry to his Odes; as for A. E. Housman (1857–1936), both collections published in his lifetime — A Shropshire Lad (1896) and Last Poems (1922) — are analysed alongside his various posthumous works (More Poems, Additional Poems). Although Gaskin acknowledges previous work on classical echoes and themes in Housman's poems, he seeks to do more: ‘we need to graduate from stamp-collecting to physics: we are in search of the spirit, not (merely) the letter’ (15). This lofty aim is occasionally realized but predominantly the ‘spirits’ of the two figures remain more distinct than alike; what common traits are found in the two poets can usually be discerned in a far broader range of ancient and modern writers.
Despite its specific focus, this book introduces ‘The New Antiquity’ series, whose professed aims encompass Altertumswissenschaft, the subsequent two millennia and more besides (iii). It is therefore difficult to categorize this book (and indeed its envisaged readership): fundamentally it is a work of literary criticism rather than a study of reception or the lyric tradition, but G. seeks to correct perceived faults in modern literary scholarship. The introduction (1–16) outlines his particular ambitions: the reconstruction of a poem's biographical context and a positivist belief in its ‘real meaning’, one fixed at the time of composition and accessible to its contemporary readership.
The subsequent nine chapters are thematic: four treat both poets together (2: ‘Pessimism and Pejorism’; 3: ‘Spring and Death’; 7: ‘Questions of Integrity and Consistency’; 8: ‘Form and Content’), two Horace specifically (3: ‘Horace's Attitude to Religion’; 6: ‘Horace and Politics’), and three Housman specifically (5: ‘Religion and Politics in Housman’; 9: ‘Housman, Literary Criticism and the Classics’; 10: ‘Housman's Criticism of Horace’). The author-specific chapters tend to be the most rewarding, since the theoretically attractive unification of the two authors in a single discussion proves practically difficult: although G.'s introductory chapter emphasizes the importance of reading each poetic collection as a whole, the book tends to proceed via close readings of individual poems.
In ch. 2 (17–41), G. demonstrates that melancholy lurks within the traditionally jocund lyrics of Horace, commonly conveyed through natural imagery, which aligns him with the more obviously ‘pejoristic’ verse of Housman. Ch. 3 (43–61) tackles a similar strain of poetic expression, the themes of springtime and death, in which Carm. 4.7 and 1.4 are especially well handled, although G. implausibly suggests (55–6) that the two poems could have been composed simultaneously.
Ch. 4 (63–75) makes a convincing case for doubting the sincerity — if that is not an anachronism — of Horace's religious devotion, deflating in particular the theological importance that has often been attributed to his ‘first hymn to Mercury’ (1.10). (Ch. 5 is purely Housmannian.) Ch. 6 (91–115) treats Horace's politics, although with less satisfactory results: the binary account of the ‘personal’ and ‘political’ (99–100) is laboured and Horace's self-presentation is not set in sufficient context with the other ‘Augustans’; nevertheless, G. plausibly suggests (101–5) that the last poem of Horace's Odes (4.15) displays ‘double irony’ and a ‘deliberate inconsistency’, a recusatio steered by Apollo into panegyric, closing ambiguously with Venus. Such themes lead into ch. 7 (117–45), which tackles poetic integrity. G. claims for Horace political, but not moral, sincerity: that may be, but his arguments (on Carm. 2.7, at 121–8) that Horace both had to mention his Republican past and do so light-heartedly fail to convince. More of the Horatian corpus here requires consideration. Ch. 8 (147–72) argues that poetic form and content are not in conflict: here G. is much stronger when treating the verbal arrangement of Horatian lyric rather than its metrical form and inheritance.
The closing section of the book, focused upon Housman, is the least successful. In ch. 9 (173–97), G. is vexed by his (in)famous separation of textual and literary criticism. Housman did indeed profess that true literary critics were vanishingly rare (and that he was not one), yet G. prefers to suppose not that Housman's conception of ‘literary criticism’ was much more specific and rarefied than the modern term, but that he ‘has not thought’ (177) and is ‘stupid or dishonest’ (189). Yet almost any of Housman's textual notes reveal that literary criticism (in its usual sense) went hand-in-hand with textual criticism for him as for any competent critic. Ch. 10 (199–222) directly addresses Housman's treatment of Horace, incorporating his lecture notes preserved in Cambridge. However, the disparaging conclusions drawn are puzzling: few careful readers of Housman's scholarship could assert that he ‘was less interested in educating his readers than in crushing them’ (203), ‘refuse[d] to have anything to do with literary criticism’ and favoured the much-maligned ‘palaeographical method’ (207).
Certainly, G. does have valuable contributions to make to understanding Horatian and Housmannian lyric (and his detailed interest in textual problems is refreshing): his close readings are often illuminating, if at times dogmatic. One wonders, however, whether a more suitable vehicle for his studies could have been found. The bibliography covers a good range but does not include the collected volume A.E. Housman: Classical Scholar (2009). As a note to the series editors, it is regrettable that the longer endnotes could not have been presented as footnotes.
