Margaret,
Thanks for bringing this up.
I enjoyed this article last week and, while it makes a few valid points, it is way over the top and vindictive in many ways. Ms Greer all too frequently mentions the amount of crap verse she gets sent every week and she seems to blame Housman for much of this. Why on earth do tyro poets send poems to an unsympathetic person like her? She also criticises Housman for "vanity publishing" usually known, in the poetry world, as self-publishing, as done by Blake or Whitman, and, I think, Yeats, at one stage, among many others, and I understand it is not regarded as all that reprehensible with a non-commercial product like poetry.
Ms Greer also appears to criticise Housman for directing his homosexual feelings towards "lads" who were safely dead, which, in the context of the times, with homosexual behavior a criminal offence, was rather wise. I have no strong feelings about Housman's verse one way or the other, but I thought it, in the end, a rather unpleasant and ungenerous article, and, even if cut down from a longer,
more nuanced? lecture, Ms Greer presumably had control over the parts published.
Oliver.
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