A.E. Housman

A.E. Housman (1859-1936) in 1910. Photo by E.O. Hoppe. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Alfred Edward Housman
Born	26 March 1859 (Template:Four digit-03-26) Bromsgrove, Worcestershire, UK
Died	30 April 1936 (Template:Four digit-05-01) (aged 77) Cambridge, UK
Occupation	classicist, poet
Nationality	British
Alma mater	St John's College, Oxford
Genres	Lyric poetry

Alfred Edward Housman (26 March 1859 - 30 April 1936) was an English poet and classical scholar, best known to the general public for his cycle of poems A Shropshire Lad.

Life

Overview

Housman was counted among the foremost classicists of his age, and has been called "one of the few real and great scholars anywhere at any time." He established his reputation publishing as a private scholar and, on the strength and quality of his work, was appointed professor of Latin at University College London and later, at Cambridge. His editions of Juvenal, Manilius and Lucan are still considered authoritative.

Youth and education

The eldest of 7 children, Housman was born at Valley House in Fockbury, a hamlet on the outskirts of Bromsgrove in Worcestershire, and was baptised at Christ Church, in Catshill. His mother died on his 12th birthday, and his father, a country solicitor, later remarried, to an elder cousin, Lucy, in 1873. Housman's brother Laurence Housman and sister Clemence Housman also became writers.

Housman was educated at King Edward's School, Birmingham; then at Bromsgrove School, where he acquired a strong academic grounding and won prizes for his poetry. In 1877, he won an open scholarship to St John's College, Oxford, where he studied classics.

Although by nature rather withdrawn, Housman formed strong friendships with 2 roommates, Moses Jackson and A.W. Pollard. Jackson became the great love of Housman's life, though the latter's feelings were not reciprocated, as Jackson was heterosexual. Housman obtained a 1st in classical Moderations in 1879, but his immersion in textual analysis, particularly with Propertius, led him to neglect ancient history and philosophy, which formed part of the Greats curriculum, and thus he failed to obtain a degree. Though some explain Housman's unexpected failure in his final exams as a result of Jackson's rejection, most biographers adduce a variety of reasons, indifference to philosophy, overconfidence in his praeternatural gifts, a contempt for inexact learning, and enjoyment of idling away his time with Jackson, conjoined with news of his father's desperate illness as the more immediate and germane causes. The failure left him with a deep sense of humiliation, and a determination to vindicate his genius.

Early career

After Oxford, Jackson got a job as a clerk in the Patent Office in London and arranged a job there for Housman as well. They shared a flat with Jackson's brother Adalbert until 1885 when Housman moved to lodgings of his own. Moses Jackson moved to India in 1887. When Jackson returned briefly to England in 1889 to marry, Housman not only was not invited to the wedding but knew nothing about it until the couple had left the country. Adalbert Jackson died in 1892.

Housman continued pursuing classical studies independently and published scholarly articles on such authors as Horace, Propertius, Ovid, Aeschylus, Euripides and Sophocles.

The pleasures Housman enjoyed included gastronomy, flying in aeroplanes, and frequent visits to France, where he read "books which were banned in Britain as pornographic". A fellow don described him as being "descended from a long line of maiden aunts".

Professorship

Housman gradually acquired such a high reputation as a classical scholar that in 1892 he was offered the professorship of Latin at University College London, which he accepted. (Many years later, the UCL Academic Staff Common Room was dedicated to his memory as the Housman Room.)

Although Housman's early work and his sphere of responsibilities as professor included both Latin and Greek, he began to focus his energy on Latin poetry. When asked later why he had stopped writing about Greek poetry, he responded, "I found that I could not attain to excellence in both."

In 1911, he took the Kennedy Professorship of Latin at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he remained for the rest of his life. Classics Professor G.P. Goold at University College, wrote of Housman's scholarly accomplishments: "The legacy of Housman's scholarship is a thing of permanent value; and that value consists less in obvious results, the establishment of general propositions about Latin and the removal of scribal mistakes, than in the shining example he provides of a wonderful mind at work.... He was and may remain the last great textual critic."

From 1903 to 1930, Housman published his critical edition of Manilius's Astronomicon in 5 volumes. He also edited works of Juvenal (1905) and Lucan (1926). Many colleagues were unnerved by his scathing critical attacks on those whom he found guilty of shoddy scholarship. In his paper "The Application of Thought to Textual Criticism," (1921) Housman stated: "A textual critic engaged upon his business is not at all like Newton investigating the motion of the planets: he is much more like a dog hunting for fleas." He declared many of his contemporary scholars to be stupid, lazy, vain, or all of the above, proclaiming: "Knowledge is good, method is good, but one thing beyond all others is necessary; and that is to have a head, not a pumpkin, on your shoulders, and brains, not pudding, in your head." His younger colleague A.S.F. Gow quotes examples of these attacks, noting that they "were often savage in the extreme."

Gow also relates how Housman intimidated his students, sometimes reducing them to tears. According to Gow, Housman could never remember his students' names, maintaining that "had he burdened his memory by the distinction between Miss Jones and Miss Robinson, he might have forgotten that between the second and fourth declension."

Housman died 3 years later, aged 77, in Cambridge. His ashes are buried near St Laurence's Church, Ludlow, Shropshire.

Private life

A.E. Housman's grave and memorial cherry tree at St. Laurence's Church in Ludlow, Shropshire, England. Photo by Brian P. Harris, 2009. Licensed under Creative Commons, courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

In his private life Housman enjoyed gastronomy, flying in aeroplanes, and making frequent visits to France, where he read "books which were banned in Britain as pornographic". But he struck A.C. Benson, a fellow don, as being "descended from a long line of maiden aunts".

His feelings about his poetry were ambivalent and he certainly treated it as secondary to his scholarship. He did not speak in public about his poems until 1933, when he gave a lecture "The Name and Nature of Poetry", arguing there that poetry should appeal to emotions rather than to the intellect.

Housman died, aged 77, in Cambridge. His ashes are buried just outside St Laurence's Church, Ludlow, Shropshire.

Writing

John Sparrow found statements in a letter written late in Housman's life which describe how his poems came into existence:

Poetry was for him ... 'a morbid secretion', as the pearl is for the oyster. The desire, or the need, did not come upon him often, and it came usually when he was feeling ill or depressed; then whole lines and stanzas would present themselves to him without any effort, or any consciousness of composition on his part. Sometimes they wanted a little alteration, sometimes none; sometimes the lines needed in order to make a complete poem would come later, spontaneously or with 'a little coaxing'; sometimes he had to sit down and finish the poem with his head. That .... was a long and laborious process.

Sparrow adds: "How difficult it is to achieve a satisfactory analysis may be judged by considering the last poem in A Shropshire Lad. Of its four stanzas, Housman tells us that two were 'given' him ready made; one was coaxed forth from his subconsciousness an hour or two later; the remaining one took months of conscious composition. No one can tell for certain which was which."

A Shropshire Lad

Main article: A Shropshire Lad

During his years in London, Housman completed A Shropshire Lad, a cycle of 63 poems. After several publishers had turned it down, he published it at his own expense in 1896. The volume surprised both his colleagues and students. Initially selling slowly, it rapidly became a lasting success, and its appeal to English musicians had helped to make it widely known before World War I, when its themes struck a powerful chord with English readers. A Shropshire Lad has been in print continuously since May 1896.

Lyrical and almost epigrammatic in form, the poems were mostly written before 1900. Their wistful evocation of doomed youth in the English countryside, in spare language and distinctive imagery, appealed strongly to late Victorian and Edwardian taste, and to many early 20th century English composers (beginning with Arthur Somervell) both before and after the First World War. Through its song-setting the poetry became closely associated with that era, and with Shropshire itself.

The poems are pervaded by deep pessimism and preoccupation with death, without religious consolation. Housman wrote most of them while living in Highgate, London, before ever visiting that part of Shropshire (about 30 miles from his home), which he presented in an idealised pastoral light, as his 'land of lost content'. Housman himself acknowledged the influence of the songs of William Shakespeare, the Scottish Border Ballads and Heinrich Heine, but specifically denied any influence of Greek and Latin classics in his poetry.

Later collections

In the early 1920s, when Moses Jackson was dying in Canada, Housman wanted to assemble his best unpublished poems so that Jackson could read them before his death. These later poems, mostly written before 1910, show a greater variety of subject and form than those in A Shropshire Lad but lack the unity of his previously published work. He published them as Last Poems (1922) because he felt his inspiration was exhausted and that he should not publish more in his lifetime. This proved true.

After A.E. Housman's death his brother, Laurence, published further poems which appeared in More Poems (1936) and Collected Poems (1939). Housman also wrote a parodic Fragment of a Greek Tragedy, in English, and humorous poems published posthumously under the title Unkind to Unicorns.

De Amicitia (about friendship)

In 1942 Laurence Housman also deposited an essay entitled "A E Housman's 'De Amicitia'" in the British Library, with the proviso that it was not to be published for 25 years. The essay discussed A E Housman's homosexuality and his love for Jackson. Despite the conservative nature of the times, Housman, as distinct from the prudence of his public life, was quite open in his poetry, and especially his A Shropshire Lad, about his deeper sympathies. Poem 30 of that sequence, for instance, speaks of how 'Fear contended with desire': "Others, I am not the first / have willed more mischief than they durst". In More Poems, he buries his love for Jackson in the very act of commemorating it, as his feelings of love break his friendship, and must be carried silently to the grave:

Because I liked you better
Than suits a man to say
It irked you, and I promised
To throw the thought away.

To put the world between us
We parted, stiff and dry;
Goodbye, said you, forget me.
I will, no fear, said I

If here, where clover whitens
The dead man's knoll, you pass,
And no tall flower to meet you
Starts in the trefoiled grass,

Halt by the headstone naming
The heart no longer stirred,
And say the lad that loved you
Was one that kept his word.

His poem, "Oh who is that young sinner with the handcuffs on his wrists?", written after the trial of Oscar Wilde, addressed more general social injustice towards homosexuality. In the poem the prisoner is suffering "for the colour of his hair", a natural, given attribute which, in a clearly coded reference to homosexuality, is reviled as "nameless and abominable" (recalling the legal phrase peccatum horribile, inter christianos non nominandum, "the horrible sin, not to be named amongst Christians").

Recognition

A.E. Housman statue, Bromsgrove, Worcestershire. Photo by Mike Dodman. Licensed under Creative Commons, courtesy Geograph.org.

Housman has a memorial panel in the stained glass window designed by Graham Jones and installed in 1994 above Chaucer's monument in Poets Corner, Westminster Abbey.

The University of Worcester has acknowledged Housman's local connection by naming the A.E. Housman Hall residence after him.

In music and art song

Housman's poetry, especially A Shropshire Lad, provided texts for a significant number of British, and in particular English, composers in the early half of the 20th century. The national, pastoral and traditional elements of his style resonated with similar trends in English music. The earliest was probably the cycle A Shropshire Lad set by Arthur Somervell in 1904, who had begun to develop the concept of the English song-cycle in his version of Tennyson's Maud a little previously. Ralph Vaughan Williams produced his most famous settings of 6 songs, the cycle On Wenlock Edge, for string quartet, tenor and piano (dedicated to Gervase Elwes) in 1909, and it became very popular after Elwes recorded it with the London String Quartet and Frederick B. Kiddle in 1917. Between 1909 and 1911 George Butterworth produced settings in two collections or cycles, as Six Songs from A Shropshire Lad, and Bredon Hill and other songs. He also wrote an orchestral tone poem on A Shropshire Lad (originally performed at Leeds Festival under Arthur Nikisch in 1912).

Butterworth's death on the Somme in 1916 was considered a great loss to English music; Ivor Gurney, another most important setter of Housman (Ludlow and Teme, a work for voice and string quartet, and a song-cycle on Housman works, both of which won the Carnegie Award) experienced emotional breakdowns which were popularly (but wrongly) believed to have arisen from shell-shock. Hence the fatalistic strain of the poems, and the earlier settings, foreshadowed responses to the universal bereavement of World War I War and became assimilated into them. This was reinforced when their foremost interpreter and performer, Gervase Elwes (who had initiated the music festivals at Brigg in Lincolnshire at which Percy Grainger and others had developed their collections of country music) died in a horrific accident in 1921. Elwes had been closely identified with English wartime morale, having given 6 benefit performances of The Dream of Gerontius on consecutive nights in 1916, and many concerts in France in 1917 for British soldiers.

Among other composers who set Housman songs were John Ireland (song cycle, Land of Lost Content), Michael Head (e.g. 'Ludlow Fair'), Graham Peel (a famous version of 'In Summertime on Bredon'), Ian Venables (Songs of Eternity and Sorrow), and American Samuel Barber (e.g. 'With rue my heart is laden'). Gerald Finzi repeatedly began settings, though never finished any. Even composers not directly associated with the 'pastoral' tradition, such as Arnold Bax, Lennox Berkeley and Arthur Bliss, were attracted to Housman's poetry. A 1976 catalogue listed 400 musical settings of Housman's poems. Housman's poetry influenced British music in a way comparable to that of Walt Whitman in the music of Delius, Vaughan Williams and others: Housman's works provided song texts, Whitman's the texts for larger choral works. The contemporary New Zealand composer David Downes includes a setting of "March" on his CD The Rusted Wheel of Things.

In popular culture

Housman is the main character in the 1997 Tom Stoppard play The Invention of Love.

Many titles for novels and films have been drawn from Housman's poetry. The line "There's this to say for blood and breath,/ they give a man a taste for death" supplies the title for Peter O'Donnell's 1969 Modesty Blaise thriller, A Taste for Death, also the inspiration for P.D. James' 1986 crime novel, A Taste for Death, the 7th in her Adam Dalgliesh series. The last words of the poem "On Wenlock Edge" are used by Audrey R. Langer for the title of the 1989 novel Ashes Under Uricon. The Nobel Prize winning novelist Patrick White named his 1955 novel The Tree Of Man after a line in A Shropshire Lad and Arthur C. Clarke's debut novel, Against the Fall of Night, is taken from a work in Housman's More Poems. The 2009 novel Blood's a Rover by James Ellroy takes its title from Housman's poem "Reveille", and a line from Housman's poem XVI "How Clear, How Lovely Bright", was used for the title of the last Inspector Morse book The Remorseful Day by Colin Dexter. Blue Remembered Hills, a television play by Dennis Potter, takes its title from "Into My Heart an Air That Kills" from A Shropshire Lad, the cycle also providing the name for the James Bond film Die Another Day: "But since the man that runs away / Lives to die another day".

Publications

Poetry

• A Shropshire Lad. London: Kegan Paul, 1896; New York: John Lane, 1900.
  • A Shropshire Lad: Authorized edition, Holt, 1924.
  • (with notes & biography by Carl J. Weber). Greenwood Press, 1980.
• Last Poems. Holt, 1922.
• More Poems. (edited by brother, Laurence Housman). Knopf, 1936.
• Collected Poems. London: J. Cape, 1939; New York: Holt, 1940. (Poems included in this volume but not earlier ones are known as Additional Poems.)
  • revised (with an Introduction by John Sparrow). Penguin Books, 1956; Holt, 1965.
• Manuscript Poems: Eight hundred lines of hitherto uncollected verse from the author's notebooks (edited by Tom Burns Haber). University of Minnesota Press, 1955; London: Oxford University Press, 1955.
• Complete Poems: Centennial edition (with introduction by Basil Davenport, commentary by Tom Burns Haber). Holt, 1959.
• Unkind to Unicorns: Selected comic verse (edited by J. Roy Birch). Cambridge, UK: Silent Books, for the Housman Society, 1995.
• Poems (edited by Archie Burnett). Oxford, UK: Clarendon, 1997.

Lectures

• Introductory Lecture, Delivered Before the Faculties of Arts and Laws and of Science in University College, London, October 3, 1892. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1892; Macmillan, 1937.
• The Name and Nature of Poetry. Macmillan, 1933.
• The Confines of Criticism: The Cambridge Inaugural, 1911 (notes by John Carter). Cambridge University Press, 1969.

Letters

• Thirty Housman Letters to Witter Bynner (edited by Tom Burns Haber). Knopf, 1957.
• A.E. Housman to Joseph Ishill: Five unpublished letters (edited by William White). Oriole Press, 1959.
• Letters (edited by Henry Maas). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971.
• Sir James G. Frazer and A.E. Housman: A relationship in letters. Duke University Press, 1974.
• Fifteen Letters to Walter Ashburner (with introduction & notes by Alan S. Bell). Tragara Press, 1976.

Collected editions

• A Centennial Memento (with commentary by William White). Oriole Press, 1959.
• Selected Prose (edited by John Carter). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1961.
• Poetry and Prose: A selection (edited by F.C. Horwood). Hutchinson, 1971.
• Classical Papers (collected & edited by J. Diggle & F.R.D. Goodyear). (3 volumes), Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1972.
• Collected Poems and Selected Prose (edited by Christopher Ricks). Allen Lane, 1988.

Edited

• M. Manilii, Astronomica (with others) . (5 volumes). London: Grant Richards, 1903-30; 2nd edition, 1937. Volume 1, Volume 2, Volume 3, Volume 4, Volume 5
  • published as Astronomicon. Georg Olms, 1972.
• D. Iunii Iuuenalis, Saturae: editorum in usum edidit. London: Grant Richards, 1905
  • revised edition, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1931.
  • published as Saturae. Greenwood Press, 1969.
• M. Annaei Lucani, Belli Civilis Libri Decem: editorum in usum edidit. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1926; 2nd ed. 1927; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1950
• William White, "Housman's Latin Inscriptions", CJ (1955) 159 - 166.

Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy the Poetry Foundation.

Poems by A.E. Housman

"Tell me not here, it needs not saying" by A. E. Housman Poem animation

'Here dead we lie' by A E Housman

"With Rue My Heart Is Laden" A.E. Housman poem from A Shropshire Lad (1896)

Terence, This Is Stupid Stuff by A.E. Housman

The Shades Of Night, by A E Housman

1. The Cherry Tree
2. To an Athlete Dying Young
3. When I was one-and-twenty

See also

• List of British poets

References

• Brink, C.O. Lutterworth.com, English Classical Scholarship: Historical Reflections on Bentley, Porson and Housman, James Clarke & Co (2009), ISBN 978-0-227-17299-5.
• Critchley, Julian, 'Homage to a lonely lad', Weekend Telegraph (UK), 23 April 1988.
• Cunningham, Valentine ed., The Victorians: An Anthology of Poetry and Poetics (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000)
• C. Efrati, The road of danger, guilt, and shame: the lonely way of A E Housman (Associated University Presse, 2002) ISBN 0-8386-3906-2
• Philip Gardner ed., A E Housman: The Critical Heritage, a collection of reviews and essays on Housman’s poetry (London: Routledge 1992)
• Philip Gardner ed., A E Housman: The Critical Heritage, a collection of reviews and essays on Housman’s poetry (London: Routledge 1992)
• Gow, A.S.F., A E Housman: A Sketch Together with a List of his Writings and Indexes to his Classical Papers (Cambridge 1936)
• Graves, Richard Perceval, A E Housman: The Scholar-Poet (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 155
• Holden, A.W. and J.R. Birch, A. E Housman - A Reassessment (Palgrave Macmillan, London 1999)
• Housman, Laurence, A.E.H.: Some Poems, Some Letters and a Personal Memoir by his Brother (London: Jonathan Cape, 1937)
• Page, Norman, ‘Housman, Alfred Edward (1859–1936)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004)
• Palmer, Christopher and Stephen Banfield, 'A E Housman', The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (London: Macmillan, 2001)
• Shaw, Robin, "Housman's Places" (The Housman Society, 1995)

External links

Poems

• "He would not stay for me, and who can wonder?"
• Poem of the week: When summer's end is nighing by AE Housman at The Guardian
• The Light Verse of A.E. Housman (3 poems)
• A.E. Housman at Poem of the Day (4 poems)
• A.E. Housman in Modern British Poetry: "Reveille," "When I was One-and-Twenty," "With Rue My Heart Is Laden," "To an Athlete Dying Young," "Loveliest of Trees"
• poems by Housman: "March," "Now dreary dawns the eastern light,," "Easter Hymn," "Twice a week the winter thorough," "Spring Morning," "The night is freezing fast," "When Summer's End is Nighing," "The Cherry Tree," "To an Athlete Dying Young," "Bring, in this timeless grave to throw."
• Housman, A.E (1859-1936) (12 poems) at Representative Poetry Online
• A.E. Housman profile and 9 poems at the Academy of American Poets
• A.E. Housman 1859-1936 at the Poetry Foundation
• Alfred Edward Housman at PoemHunter (82 poems)
• A.E. Housman Selected Poems
• A.E. Housman, complete collection of Housman's serious poetry

Audio/video

• Free Housman audio readings at Librivox
• BBC Profile 24 June 2009

Books

• Works by Alfred Edward Housman at Project Gutenberg
• Works by or about A.E. Housman in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
• A.E. Housman at Amazon.com

About

• A.E. Housman in the Encyclopædia Britannica
• A.E. Housman at NNDB
• A.E. Housman (1859-1936) at the Victorian Web
• "Star man": An article in the TLS by Robert Douglas Fairhurst, 20 June 2007
• London Review of Books review of "The Letters of A.E. Housman" 5 July 2007
• "Lost Horizon: The sad and savage wit of A.E. Housman" New Yorker article (5 pages) by Anthony Lane 19 February 2001

Etc.

• The Housman Society