Enoch Powell on A. E. Housman

“Again as with a bullfight, you never appreciate this sport till you see a really great performer. Something departed for ever from the pleasure of specialist review reading when A. E. Housman gibbeted his last victim.”

“The exhilaration was produced by watching what seemed to be a mental machine of great power and precision applied to material at first sight unexpected... The severity of Housman's presentation was the severity not of passionlessness but of suppressed passion, passion for true poetry and passion for truthfulness. For Housman textual criticism was the exercise of moral self-discipline... The phrases remembered over the years flashed from the inner furnace of passion for truth and logical thought, and of indignation against every interest or influence which could corrupt it... Under the radiation of this display of a great critical mind in action, one's own powers, such as they might be, developed – above all, the spirit of bold but temperate self-reliance without which no criticism is possible.”