Star-Defeated Sighs”: Classical Cosmology and Astronomy in the Poetry of A. E. Housman’

摘要

A. E. Housman is renowned as the scholar–poet who in his lifetime published two slim volumes of verse – A Shropshire Lad (1896) 1 and Last Poems (1922) 2 – a much larger volume of classical papers, and an edition of Manilius' Astronomica that remains the definitive Latin text to this day. Although Housman had little sympathy with Manilius's stoical beliefs about the operation of divine reason in the universe, both the poems and the Astronomica share the sense of human beings playing out their lives in a cosmos where stronger impersonal forces are at work. Since Astronomica is an extended astrological text, this is, of course, to be expected; in the poems, the cosmological and astronomical references are more subtly exploited and are derived from other classical authors, such as Lucretius, and Housman's own extensive knowledge of astronomy. Nevertheless, an awareness of such sources and references remains crucial for a fuller understanding of Housman's poetic achievement