page_title: More Poems
section_title: Editing
hierarchical_section_title: More Poems / Editing
caption_attribution_description: English: Cover design by Francis Todd for the 1936 U.S. edition of More Poems by A. E. Housman
context_page_description: After A. E. Housman’s death in 1936, his brother Laurence was made his literary executor and over the next two years published further selections of poems from his manuscripts: in 1936 More Poems and, between 1937-9, Additional Poems, although the latter were never printed as a separate edition. As much more of Housman's earlier writing was brought to light, its autobiographical nature clarified his suppressed homosexuality. There are also recognisable Classical influences.
context_section_description: In the preface to More Poems, Laurence Housman quoted the following instructions from the poet's will:
  "I permit [my brother] but do not enjoin him to select from my verse manuscript writing, and to publish, any poems which appear to him to be completed and to be not inferior to the average of my published poems; and I direct him to destroy all other poems and fragments of verse."
  Only two collections of A. E. Housman's poems had been published at widely separated intervals during his lifetime, A Shropshire Lad (1896) and Last Poems (1922). Laurence published a further 49 poems in More Poems on 26 October 1936, only a few months after the poet's death. The first impression was of 8,856 copies, followed immediately by a second impression of 5081; a later corrected third printing of 7,500 followed that. The American edition published that year had several textual differences to the British original.
  A further selection of 18 poems under the title Additional Poems appeared in Laurence's memoir My Brother, A.E. Housman (1937), together with his light verse and parodies and a selection of letters. Five more poems (three from old periodicals) were added to these in the Collected Poems of 1939.
  Subsequent scholarship, most notably by Tom Burns Haber in The Manuscript Poems of A. E. Housman (1955) and Archie Burnett in his edition of The Poems of A. E. Housman (1997), has deprecated Laurence's editing. Burnett charged that “The text of many poems was misrepresented: poems not completed by Housman were printed as though complete; versions he cancelled were reinstated; separate texts were conflated; and many poems were mistranscribed from the manuscripts.”
caption: Cover design by Francis Todd for the U.S. edition of More Poems
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