Ten Thousand Times I've Done My Best

The Rainy Pleiads Wester Orion Plunges Prone, And Midnight Strikes And Hastens, And I Lie Down Alone.

Good Religious Poetry... Is Likely To Be Most Justly Appreciated And Most Discriminately Relished By The Undevout.

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.

On Occasions, After Drinking A Pint Of Beer At Luncheon, There Would Be A Flow Into My Mind With Sudden And Unaccountable Emotion, Sometimes A Line Or Two Of Verse, Sometimes A Whole Stanza, Accompanied, Not Preceded By A Vague Notion Of The Poem Which They Were Destined To Form A Part Of.... I Say Bubble Up Because, So Far As I Could Make Out, The Source Of The Suggestions Thus Proffered To The Brain Was The Pit Of The Stomach.

Housman Is One Of My Heroes And Always Has Been. He Was A Detestable And Miserable Man. Arrogant, Unspeakably Lonely, Cruel, And So On, But And Absolutely Marvellous Minor Poet, I Think, And A Great Scholar.