Give crowns and pounds and guineas But not your heart away; Give pearls away and rubies, But keep your fancy free.
A. E. HOUSMANHousman is one of my heroes and always has been. He was a detestable and miserable man. Arrogant, unspeakably lonely, cruel, and so on, but and absolutely marvellous minor poet, I think, and a great scholar.
More A. E. Housman Quotes
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I find Cambridge an asylum, in every sense of the word.
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The troubles of our proud and angry dust are from eternity, and shall not fail. Bear them we can, and if we can we must. Shoulder the sky, my lad, and drink your ale.
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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.
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Oh I have been to Ludlow fair, and left my necktie God knows where. And carried half way home, or near, pints and quarts of Ludlow beer.
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Earth and high heaven are fixed of old and founded strong.
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Good religious poetry… is likely to be most justly appreciated and most discriminately relished by the undevout.
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A moment’s thought would have shown him. But a moment is a long time, and thought is a painful process.
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And how am I to face the odds Of man’s bedevilment and God’s? I, a stranger and afraid In a world I never made.
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Stars, I have seen them fall, But when they drop and die No star is lost at all From all the star-sown sky. The toil of all that be Helps not the primal fault; It rains into the sea And still the sea is salt.
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In every American there is an air of incorrigible innocence, which seems to conceal a diabolical cunning.
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His folly has not fellow Beneath the blue of day That gives to man or woman His heart and soul away.
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Tell me not here, it needs not saying, What tune the enchantress plays In aftermaths of soft September Or under blanching mays, For she and I were long acquainted And I knew all her ways.
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Lovers lying two and two Ask not whom they sleep beside, And the bridegroom all night through Never turns him to the bride.
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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.
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Poetry is not the thing said, but the way of saying it.
A. E. HOUSMAN