Poet as poem: The intermedial staging of A. E. Housman in Tom Stoppard's The Invention of Love

Abstract

Abstract Tom Stoppard's The Invention of Love (1997) offers the audience a dream‐like voyage through the post‐mortem reminiscences of the central character, A. E. Housman. The attempt to resurrect Housman, as the historical figure in real life, is suspended by the intertextual incorporation of Housman's poems, the both fictive and enigmatically private voice of which opens up the illusory closure of biographically accurate dramatic characterisation. By fluidising and activating the subversive emotions contained in the formal patterns of the poetic text, the intermedial stage with the corporeality of its theatrical embodiment becomes a spatialised metaphor for the poetry as an open space that is inviting meaning to be projected onto it. The poetic and the theatrical, thus deterritorialised by their intermedial exchanges, interlace a dreamscape in which the nomadic search for the uncorrupted, unappropriated poet/poem continuum provides a transcendental empiricist reading of the ‘truth’ about Housman.