Micheal Macklem writes that Housman?s devotion toward classics has been thought of as an unfortunate digression from his poetry. Edmund Wilson tried to find a relationship between the poetry and classical scholarship of Housman, but came to a conclusion that the scholarship in Housman?s poetry should not deserve any attention. A number of themes in Housman?s poetry deal with the central attitude to the ?commonplaces of human existence.? Wilson says, ?his achievement has been merely to state memorably certain melancholy commonplaces of human existence without any real presentation of that existence as we live it through?One can only come the same painful cropper over and over again and draw from it the same painful moral.? Macklem thinks this common theme will lead to an appreciation of
the intimate nature of the values of life. For Housman, he thinks it will broaden and deepen the meanings of poetry itself.
Micheal Macklem thinks the contrast between the joy of life and its transience is the source of Housman?s elegiac theme. Housman?s treatment of elegiac material is distinctively pastoral-so much is clear. The mood in the pastoral elegy is that of personal grief, but the poet?s grief is generalized in a sympathetic response to the universal facts of death. Macklem says, ?The pastoral elegiac theme is taken, essentially, from the contrast between the immortality of nature and the mortality of man, between the natural cycle of rebirth and the finality of human death. Macklem believes we have recognized a modern version of pastoral elegy, seen in the spring of the y
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