[lit-ideas] The Most Handsome Man in England IS a Poet

Helm:
 
"They read their
poems out loud and are jealous of the good  poets and the handsome ones whom
the girls are attracted to." 

What is  it with females that they look the harmonious form in a male? When 
M. A. wrote  this biography of the Great War poet Rupert Calvert Brooke, he 
entitled it,  after Yeats, 
 
"The most handsome man in England" 
 
-- Possibly he was, if you are into the rather unLatin  unsexy English type 
of the angel-face (I don't mean ALL ENGLISH TYPES are  unsexy, so S. Ward do 
not take offence). I'm saying that Yeats's would hardly be  making a 
universalistic claim a la Kant in his Philosophy of Judgement. 
 
But then, if you compare it with Housman!  I actually am  an official member 
of BOTH the Rupert Brooke Society (founded by M. Read -- M.  Thatcher is 
another member) *and* The Housman Society (founded by John Page in  
Worcestershire), and must say that Housman was not your Byronic type of poet. 
He  loved to 
translate Juvenal, I now see, and engage in the services of FRENCH male  
prostitutes. 
 
Brooke was heterosexual, and to his discredit he got an Indian  (in Tahiti) 
pregnant, and they say there are Brook-a-likes on that island till  today. 
 
My other favourite English poets -- I don't read Chilean --  are:

AUDEN, Wystan Hugh
    born York
BEDDOES
   If there were dreams to sell
HOUSMAN, A. E. 
SHAKESPEARE
   The sonnets set to music by H. Parry   
 
and most of the poems quoted by Timothy D'Arch-Smith in his book on  
turn-of-the-century poetry. 
 
While heterosexual, Brooke had a big gay following and he liked the  
ambiguity of all, and called it 'pagan' (There's a book I must find on his life 
 
called "The neo-pagans"). 

Cheers,
 

JL




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