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Housman's Dirty Postcards: Poetry, Modernism, and Masochism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Peter Howarth
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Abstract

Housman's bitter poems about fate, betrayal, and unhappiness were dismissed by many modernist critics and poets on account of their author's pathological self-division, both in content and form. As Housman's thwarted homosexuality became more widely known, it seemed the obvious source of his relentless oppositions between desire and a fateful law. But his newly recovered collection of pornography and sexology shows as much interest in sadomasochistic fantasy scenarios as in homosexuality, scenarios in which sufferer and torturer are covertly agreeing to play the same game. This interest means not only that the poems protesting against punishment might be covertly identifying with it but also that they might covertly ironize the aesthetic criteria of Housman's modernist opponents. Auden's, Richards's, and Leavis's organicist ideas about poetry's cultural mission, based on Schiller's model of the aesthetic state, are parodied by the unmediated, self-contained, and homeostatic relationships found in the masochistic fantasies of Housman's collection.

Type
Cluster on Queer Modernism
Information
PMLA , Volume 124 , Issue 3 , May 2009 , pp. 764 - 781
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2009

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