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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.

A. E. Housman

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A. E. Housman
Age: 77 †
Born: 1859
Born: January 1
Died: 1936
Died: January 1
Classical Philologist
Classical Scholar
Poet
University Teacher
Writer
Worcs
A. E. Housman
Felt
Vibrations
Thought
Peculiar
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Thinking
Reader
Poetry
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Vibration
Emotion
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More quotes by A. E. Housman

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You smile upon your friend to-day, To-day his ills are over You hearken to the lover's say, And happy is the lover. 'Tis late to hearken, late to smile, But better late than never: I shall have lived a little while Before I die for ever.
A. E. Housman
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The fairies break their dances And leave the printed lawn.
A. E. Housman
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I am not a pessimist but a pejorist (as George Eliot said she was not an optimist but a meliorist) and that philosophy is founded on my observation of the world, not on anything so trivial and irrelevant as personal history.
A. E. Housman
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There, by the starlit fences The wanderer halts and hears My soul that lingers sighing About the glimmering weirs.
A. E. Housman
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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.
A. E. Housman
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We now to peace and darkness And earth and thee restore Thy creature that thou madest And wilt cast forth no more.
A. E. Housman
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Look not in my eyes, for fear They mirror true the sight I see, And there you find your face too clear And love it and be lost like me.
A. E. Housman
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Oh when I was in love with you, Then I was clean and brave, And miles around the wonder grew How well did I behave. And now the fancy passes by, And nothing will remain, And miles around they'll say that I Am quite myself again.
A. E. Housman
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Strapped, noosed, nighing his hour, He stood and counted them and cursed his luck And then the clock collected in the tower Its strength, and struck.
A. E. Housman
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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.
A. E. Housman
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Tomorrow, more's the pity, Away we both must hie, To air the ditty and to earth I.
A. E. Housman
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Ten thousand times I've done my best and all's to do again.
A. E. Housman
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Earth and high heaven are fixed of old and founded strong.
A. E. Housman
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That is the land of lost content, I see it shining plain, the happy highways where I went and cannot come again.
A. E. Housman
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These, in the day when heaven was falling, The hour when earth's foundations fled, Followed their mercenary calling And took their wages and are dead. The British regulars who made the retreat from Mons, beginning August 24, 1914.
A. E. Housman
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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.
A. E. Housman
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This is for all ill-treated fellows Unborn and unbegot, For them to read when they're in trouble And I am not.
A. E. Housman
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Nature, not content with denying him the ability to think, has endowed him with the ability to write.
A. E. Housman
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All knowledge is precious whether or not it serves the slightest human use.
A. E. Housman
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Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose, But young men think it is, and we were young.
A. E. Housman