Thursday, August 2, 2012 at 10:37AM
Drew Wolfe

A. E. Housman

Ale, man, ale's the stuff to drink for fellows whom it hurts to think. 

And malt does more than Milton can to justify God's ways to man. 

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. 

Experience has taught me, when I am shaving of a morning, to keep watch over my thoughts, because, if a line of poetry strays into my memory, my skin bristles so that the razor ceases to act. 

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. 

Here dead lie we because we did not choose to live and shame the land from which we sprung. Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose; but young men think it is, and we were young. 

I find Cambridge an asylum, in every sense of the word. 

If a line of poetry strays into my memory, my skin bristles so that the razor ceases to act. 

In every American there is an air of incorrigible innocence, which seems to conceal a diabolical cunning. 

Malt does more than Milton can to justify God's ways to man.

Nature, not content with denying him the ability to think, has endowed him with the ability to write. 

Shoulder the sky, my lad, and drink your ale. 

That is the land of lost content, I see it shining plain, the happy highways where I went and cannot come again. 

The average man, if he meddles with criticism at all, is a conservative critic. 

The house of delusions is cheap to build but drafty to live in.

 

 

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