ABSTRACT
When A. E. Housman gave the Leslie Stephen lecture at Cambridge in 1933 he entitled it The Name and Nature of Poetry, and he spent the first half of it discussing the name because he was by no means sure that the name of poetry conveyed its true nature to many people who used it. The sort of confusion he had in mind was the difference between poetry and versification and prose and what the eighteenth century called wit. In the second part of the lecture he came to talk of the nature of poetry and made the famous declaration that it was a sensation in the pit of the stomach, a pretty mixture of mockery and truth. But he had in the course of these two logical exercises – logic is concerned both by derivation of the word and in modern philosophy with the meaning of words — thrown up a good many instances of poetry and out of them revealed by induction what poetry was. Opposed to the empirical method of induction is the method of analysis: what is a folk-song ?
