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A.E. Housman

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• The Poetry Archive - Biography of A. E. Housman
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• A.E. Housman - Student Encyclopedia (Ages 11 and up)

A.E. Housman (born March 26, 1859, Fockbury, Worcestershire, Eng.—died April 30, 1936, Cambridge) was an English scholar and celebrated poet whose lyrics express a Romantic pessimism in a spare, simple style.

Housman, whose father was a solicitor, was one of seven children. He much preferred his mother; and her death on his 12th birthday was a cruel blow, which is surely one source of the pessimism his poetry expresses. While a student at Oxford, he was further oppressed by his dawning realization of homosexual desires. These came to focus in an intense love for one of his fellow students, an athletic young man who became his friend but who could not reciprocate his love. In turmoil emotionally, Housman failed to pass his final examination at Oxford, although he had been a brilliant scholar.

From 1882 to 1892 he worked as a clerk in the Patent Office in London. In the evenings he studied Latin texts in the British Museum reading room and developed a consummate gift for correcting errors in them, owing to his mastery of the language and his feeling for the way poets choose their words. Articles he wrote for journals caught the attention of scholars and led to his appointment in 1892 as professor of Latin at University College, London.

Apparently convinced that he must live without love, Housman became increasingly reclusive and for solace turned to his notebooks, in which he had begun to write the poems that eventually made up A Shropshire Lad (1896). For models he claimed the poems of Heinrich Heine , the songs of William Shakespeare , and the Scottish border ballads. Each provided him with a way of expressing emotion clearly and yet keeping it at a certain distance. For the same purpose, he assumed in his lyrics the unlikely role of farm labourer and set them in Shropshire , a county he had not yet visited when he began to write the first poems. The popularity of A Shropshire Lad grew slowly but so surely that Last Poems (1922) had astonishing success for a book of verse.

Housman regarded himself principally as a Latinist and avoided the literary world. In 1911 he became professor of Latin at Cambridge , teaching there almost up to his death. His major scholarly effort, to which he devoted more than 30 years, was an annotated edition of Manilius (1903–30), whose poetry he did not like but who gave him ample scope for emendation. Some of the asperity and directness that appears in Housman’s lyrics also is found in his scholarship, in which he defended common sense with a sarcastic wit that helped to make him widely feared.

A lecture, The Name and Nature of Poetry (1933), gives Housman’s considered views of the art. His brother Laurence selected the verses for the posthumous volume More Poems (1936). Housman’s Letters appeared in 1971.

Poems & Poets

A. E. Housman

At first glance, it can be a major surprise that the author of the enormously popular poetry collection A Shropshire Lad was a classical scholar by the name of A.E. Housman. Alfred Edward Housman was born in Worcestershire, England, and he was profoundly affected by his mother’s death when he was 12. This Cambridge University professor of Latin left no doubt about his priorities: the emendation of classical texts was both an intellectual search for the truth and his life’s work; poetry was an emotional and physiological experience that began with a sensation in the pit of the stomach. The apparent discrepancies in this man who became both a first-rate scholar and a celebrated poet should be a reminder that, whatever else poetry does, it also records the interior life, a life that has its roots well beneath the academic gown or the business suit. Though Housman aspired to be a great scholar first, a look at his life and work reveals that he valued poetry more highly than he often admitted, and that many of the presumed conflicts between the classical scholar and the romantic poet easily dissolve in the personality of the man.

Though the modern student is usually more interested in Housman’s poetry than his textual criticism, a survey of his scholarship helps to appreciate his overall contribution as a scholar. From his early work on Propertius at Oxford University through his professorship at University College, London, and culminating in his office as Kennedy Professor of Latin at Cambridge University, Housman was not interested in the interpretation of the works of the classical writers he treated. Instead, he was solely involved in the investigation of manuscripts to establish reliable texts of their works. This process usually required the peeling away of centuries of errors made by previous editors, whom Housman frequently treated with scorn. In “The Application of Thought to Textual Criticism,” a paper presented to the Classical Association at Cambridge in 1921 and collected in John Carter’s 1961 edition of the writer’s prose, Housman described textual criticism as both a science and an art, requiring reason and common sense. As a science, however, it was not exact, he declared: “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.” Housman railed against the prevailing practice of accepting earlier manuscripts as better manuscripts or of accepting all readings—however inane—within a manuscript simply because of the authority of the whole. In this regard he criticized scholars for being lazy, and this tone of moral rectitude permeated the entire paper. Many scholars, he said, are stupid, lazy, vain—or all three. His last sentence put a cap on it: “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.”

Concerning Housman’s own reputation as a classical scholar, D.R. Shackleton Bailey in a 1959 Listener article said that he was “beyond serious dispute, among the greatest of all time.” Bailey spoke of the scholar’s “passionate zeal to see each one of the innumerable problems in his text not as others had presented it or as he might have preferred it to appear but exactly as it was.” According to John Bayley in the London Review of Books, Housman was “a scholar worshipped and hated for his meticulous standards and his appalling sarcasms on the unscholarly.” Housman’s greatest single textual work was his five-volume edition of the Astronomica of Manilius, a first century CE. Latin poet. The first volume of this work was published in 1903 and the last in 1930. That Housman chose Manilius, a second-rate poet, over Propertius or any of the other better writers with whom he was familiar reveals his desire to establish for himself an unassailable reputation, for as Andrew S.F. Gow declared in A.E. Housman, the scholar realized that the Astronomica of Manilius provided him the greatest opportunity “of approaching finality in the solution of the problems presented.” In a letter to Housman’s biographer Graves, G.P. Goold, a later holder of the Latin chair at University College, summed up the scholar’s 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. … And if we accord [Richard] Bentley the honour of being England’s greatest Latinist, it will be largely because Housman declined to claim the title for himself.”

It was at University College that Housman experienced his most sustained period of poetry composition, and the main fruit of this period was the publication of A Shropshire Lad in 1896. First offered to Macmillan Company in 1896 under the title “Poems by Terence Hearsay,” A Shropshire Lad was rejected by that publisher: it was brought out in the same year by Kegan Paul, with the change in the title suggested by Housman’s friend Pollard. The book was published at the author’s own expense, and he insisted that he receive no royalties. There wouldn’t have been many anyway, since Kegan Paul printed only 500, and, as Maude M. Hawkins noted in A.E. Housman: Man Behind a Mask, the book “sold so slowly that Laurence Housman at the end of two years bought up the last few copies.” Though the volume was better appreciated in the United States than in England, Hawkins described most of the critical reviews as “lukewarm or adverse.” A Shropshire Lad did not sell well until it was published by Grant Richards, who became one of Housman’s lifelong friends. Richards’s first edition was 500 copies in 1897, which sold out; he then printed 1000 copies in 1900 followed by 2000 in 1902. “After the slow stream of Housman readers from 1896 to 1903, the momentum of popularity increased rapidly,” Hawkins wrote. “During this period A Shropshire Lad had been reviewed in thirty-three periodicals with both praise and condemnation.”

During the 20th century A Shropshire Lad has been more of a popular than a critical success. Looking back to the book’s heyday, George Orwell remarked in Inside the Whale and Other Essays : “Among people who were adolescent in the years 1910-25, Housman had an influence which was enormous and is now [1940] not at all easy to understand. In 1920, when I was about seventeen, I probably knew the whole of A Shropshire Lad by heart.” Orwell suggested that what made the poem so popular was its snobbishness about belonging to the country; its adolescent themes of murder, suicide, unhappy love, and early death; and its “bitter, defiant paganism, a conviction that life is short and the gods are against you, which exactly fitted the prevailing mood of the young.”

In all of his poetry, Housman continually returns to certain favorite themes. The predominant theme, discussed by Cleanth Brooks in the Ricks collection of essays, is that of time and the inevitability of death. As Brooks said, “Time is, with Housman, always the enemy.” In the first poem of A Shropshire Lad, “1887,” one of the few to be titled, the conventional patriotism of the Queen’s jubilee is shot through with the irony that God can only save the Queen with the help of those who have died for her sake: “The saviours come not home tonight: / Themselves they could not save.” Housman frequently deals with the plight of the young soldier, and he is usually able to maintain sympathy both for the youth who is the victim of war and for the patriotic cause of the nation. Robert B. Pearsall suggested in a 1967 PMLA essay that Housman dealt frequently with soldiers because “the uniform tended to cure isolation and unpopularity, and soldiers characteristically bask in mutual affection.”

It is not only war but nature, too, that brings on thoughts of death in Housman’s poetry. In the famous Shropshire Lad lyric beginning “Loveliest of trees, the cherry now,” the speaker says that since life is all too short, he will go out “To see the cherry hung with snow,” an obvious suggestion of death. In a well-known verse from Last Poems, a particularly wet and old spring causes the speaker to move from a description of nature—“The chestnut casts his flambeaux, and the flowers stream from the hawthorn on the wind away”—to a sense that his lost spring brings one closer to the grave, which, in turn, occasions a splenetic remark about the deity: “Whatever brute and blackguard made the world.” To his credit, Housman rarely wallows in such pessimistic feelings but counsels a kind of stoical endurance as the proper response: “Shoulder the sky, my lad, and drink your ale.” When the sky cannot be shouldered, a type of Roman suicide may be appropriate, as in “Shot? so quick, so clean an ending?” or in another Shropshire Lad poem, which ends with the lines: “But play the man, stand up and end you, / When your sickness is your soul.”

Another frequent theme in Housman’s poetry is the attitude that the universe is cruel and hostile, created by a God who has abandoned it. In the poem “Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries” in Last Poems, mercenaries must take up the slack for an uncaring deity: “What God abandoned, these defended, / And saved the sum of things for pay.” In such a world where “malt does more than Milton can / To justify God’s ways to man,” as the lyricist wrote in A Shropshire Lad, poetry can serve the purpose of inuring one to the harshness of reality. R. Kowalczyk, in a 1967 Cithara essay, summed up this prevalent theme: “Housman’s poetic characters fail to find divine love in the universe. They confront the enormity of space and realize that they are victims of Nature’s blind forces. A number of Housman’s lyrics scrutinize with cool, detached irony the impersonal universe, the vicious world in which man was placed to endure his fated existence.”

Within such a universe, the pastoral theme of the preciousness of youth and youthful beauty is everywhere to be found. In “ To an Athlete Dying Young ,” the youth is praised for leaving a world with his accomplishments intact. Like the young girl Lucy in romantic poet William Wordsworth ’s lyrics, Housman’s youths sometimes die into nature and become part of the natural surroundings: “By brooks too broad for leaping / The lightfoot boys are laid; / The rose-lipt girls are sleeping / In fields where roses fade.” But as Brooks declared, as recorded in Ricks’s collection of essays, Housman’s nature cannot be the same as Wordsworth’s after the century’s achievement in science: “Housman’s view of nature looks forward to our time rather than back to that of Wordsworth. If nature is lovely and offers man delight, she does not offer him solace or sustain him as Wordsworth was solaced and sustained. For between Wordsworth and Housman there interpose themselves Darwin and Huxley and Tindall—the whole achievement of Victorian science.”

Furthermore, society sometimes intrudes into Housman’s world of nature, and when it does, the rustic youth frequently comes in conflict with it. As Oliver Robinson wrote in Angry Dust: The Poetry of A.E. Housman, “Housman is especially sympathetic with the man who is at odds with society, the man who cannot keep ‘these foreign laws of God and man.’"

The themes of his poetry and his emotional handling of them mark Housman as an extension of the romantic movement that flourished in England in the early part of the 19th century and had a resurgence in the aesthetic movement of the 1890s. The critical evaluation of Housman’s work in the two decades after his death in 1936 is tinged with the anti-romanticism of the period. The directness and simplicity of much of Housman’s poetry were viewed as faults. According to Richard Aldington , influential critic I.A. Richards is rumored to have declared “This had put us back ten years,” after leaving Housman’s Cambridge inaugural lecture And Cyril Connolly, in a 1936 New Statesman article reprinted in Ricks’s essay collection, said that Housman’s poems “are of a triteness of technique equalled only by the banality of thought.” He also talked about the limitations of the poet’s themes of man’s mortality and rebellion against his lot.

To see irony in Housman’s poetic technique, however, is to mitigate some of what would otherwise be considered faults: the adolescent nature of some of the thought and the sentimental handling of it. Christopher Ricks, in the essay in his collection on Housman, noted that “everyone seems to take it for granted that Housman’s poems unwaveringly endorse the pessimistic beliefs which they assert. To me his poems are remarkable for the ways in which rhythm and style temper or mitigate or criticize what in bald paraphrase the poem would be saying.”

Regardless of whether one finds irony in the author’s poetic technique, it is true that Housman tried to place some distance between himself and his work. Referring to A Shropshire Lad in a letter written in 1933, Housman stated that “very little in the book is biographical” and said that his view of the world was “owing to my observation of the world, not to personal circumstances.” As to the county of Shropshire itself, Housman admitted in a letter to Maurice Pollet: “I was born in Worcestershire, not Shropshire, where I have never spent much time.”

In his roles as classical scholar and as poet, Housman exhibited an unswerving integrity. While this integrity served him well in his classical endeavors, in his poetry it may have relegated him to a rank below that of the major poets of his age. His poetry, based as it is on emotion, never went beyond what he could verify with his own feelings. As Edmund Wilson said in an essay appearing in the Ricks collection, “His world has no opening horizons; it is a prison that one can only endure. One can only come the same painful cropper over and over again and draw from it the same bitter moral.” But few writers have expressed this dark if limited vision with more poignancy and clarity than Housman.

Housman died in 1936 in Cambridge. A posthumous collection, called More Poems , was edited by his brother Laurence Housman.

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A. E. Housman Biography

Birthday: March 26 , 1859 ( Aries )

Born In: Fockbury, England

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Also Known As: Alfred Edward Housman

Died At Age: 77

father: Edward Housman

mother: Sarah Jane

siblings: Clemence Housman, Laurence Housman

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Died on: April 30 , 1936

place of death: Cambridge, England

Notable Alumni: St John's College, Oxford

education: St John's College, Oxford

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A. E. Housman (1859-1936): A Life in Brief

Dick sullivan.

[ Victorian Web Home —> Authors —> A. E. Housman —> Works —> Introduction ]

A. E. Housman by William Rothenstein. [Click on image to enlarge it.]

His mother died of cancer on his twelfth birthday: by his thirteenth he was a deist , and a few years later became the atheist he remained all his life. He won a scholarship to St John's College, Oxford. Pater was there, Wilde was in his last term, Jowett was Master of Balliol, Ruskin was visiting professor of art, Hopkins was a priest writing 'Duns Scotus's Oxford' about the 'base and brickish skirt' already encroaching on the town. It was a very Victorian place (apart from Wilde's outrageously coloured knickerbockers) of mutton-chop whiskers, frock coats and stove pipe hats on Sundays.

Housman was already arrogant, already sure he knew what his life's work was to be: redaction — the search for truth through correcting scribal errors in classical texts. He made his name with, among other works, an edition of Manilius, a first-century Roman astronomer whose poetry was poor, his science worse. To Housman, the quality of the book as literature didn't matter. All that did was the accuracy of the text — what did the writer write, how did scribes miscopy it? Redaction was about the defeat of decay. Who did he write for? For the one person, not yet born, with the knowledge and insight to appreciate what he'd done. Perhaps he's still waiting.

At Oxford he also fell in love for the first and only time. Housman was gay. Moses Jackson was not; he was a beefy rowing blue — someone who had earned the equivalent of an American varsity letter — up in Oxford on a science scholarship. Homosexuality he called 'beastliness' or 'spooniness'. And that for Housman meant a lifetime of unfulfilled loneliness.

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

In the year of his Finals, Housman was absorbed in Propertius (a poet who wasn't even in the syllabus), lazed away his time with Jackson (perhaps), was upset by his father's decline and feebleness (maybe) and over-confident (possibly). Certainly he failed Greats.

For the next eleven years he was a clerk in the Patent Office, at first because Moses Jackson also worked there. They shared lodgings till Jackson sailed to India to become the headmaster of a school (he also taught science and even designed the lab furniture). Eighteen months later he came home to marry, but Housman was not asked to the wedding, and in fact knew nothing about it until bride and groom were at sea. They rarely met again. And then never after Jackson retired to British Columbia where he died of cancer in 1922.

Meanwhile, Housman had been making a name for himself in the small world of textual criticism through spare time study in the British Museum. In 1892, on the strength of this scholarship, he was offered the Chair of Latin at University College, London (UCL) .

In 1896, he published A Shropshire Lad , a book of sixty three poems speaking of loss and loneliness, Redcoats, hangings and ale. Larkin called him 'the poet of unhappiness.' Auden complained he was adolescent. Orwell confused him with the class war. His poetry is notable for its simplicity, clarity and brevity — yet there is a depth to it as well. [Housman: Poetry]

Some at UCL said he was scathing yet remote; a man who never troubled to remember the faces of the young women in his classes. At least one student said he never spoke to anybody individually. Others gave different accounts, of course. Who knows? Teachers are there to be caricatured. With staff he was more congenial, even genial, and particularly good at dinner. His idea of a good night out was dinner at the Caf— Royal, a music hall, and supper in the Criterion Grille. Now he had money he became bit of a gastronome and oenophile, holidaying in Paris (for food), Italy (for culture).

If you'd asked Housman the great Socratic question: 'How should we live?' he'd have replied: 'Through knowledge for its own sake, curiosity, the craving to know things as they really are.' Truth was paramount and was to be found in exact knowledge, though mankind had only a faint sense of it. Somewhere hidden in the errors of a classical text was the truth, the words the poet had written. To find them again was to right a kind of wrong done against the truth. The Tree of Knowledge will make us wise, he argued, because our natures need knowledge to be fulfilled.

In 1911 he became Kennedy Professor of Latin in Cambridge, and a fellow of Trinity College. At high table he could dine with seven Nobel Laureates, four presidents of the Royal Society, the philosophers Whitehead, Russell, Wittgenstein, as well as Rutherford who split the atom, and the man who discovered argon. Gide was a guest, and Gertrude Stein and Alice B Toklas.

In August 1914 the Great War broke out. It's hard to know what to make of Housman's attitude. At the outbreak of war he gave most of his money to the Exchequer. But then he seems to have largely ignored wounded men and soldiers under orders for the Front, when Trinity was half-converted into a hospital and barracks. He did contribute verses to The Blunderbuss , a magazine produced by troops billeted there, but it was a tinkling 1890s piece ( Last Poems II) wholly out of keeping with what was going on in Flanders. In 1915 he holidayed on the Riviera because, he said, the usual appalling people weren't there. But in 1916 he refused to make the tedious crossing to Le Havre when Dieppe was closed to civilians. Not out of fear of U-boats, he said. He thought a U-boat had more to fear from being rammed by a steamer than the steamer had of being torpedoed. And this at time when U-boats were bringing the country to within seven days of defeat. However he did send his sister some verse ( Last Poems IV) when her son was killed in action. Poetry, he said, is to harmonise the sadness of the universe.

The War changed nothing, he claimed. But of course it did. Nothing was ever the same again. His particular kind of scholarship to begin with. He'd always said a scholar had no more concern with the beauty of a text than a botanist had with a flower's. Now he had. Content suddenly mattered, not just form.

Last Poems came out in 1922, the year that Moses Jackson died of stomach cancer in Vancouver. It's very likely the book was written and put together (several poems date from the '90s) just for him. Jackson read it before he died. The letter Housman wrote has not been made public, but is said to very self-revealing.

Still, he still took afternoon walks in a school-boyish cricket cap, grey suit, starched collar and elastic sided boots. He said 'hello' to no one; this was walking time, talking was for dinner. Every year, too, he vacationed on the Continent; flew there, presumably in converted bombers when passenger flights were in the pioneer stage and the crockery was real, the cutlery silver.

He'd lived in the same three Victorian rooms ('bare, bleak, grim, stark, comfortless,' various people called them) until he was too frail to climb the stairs. For a time he lived in Trinity's older buildings before going to a nursing home in Trumpington Street where he died, in his sleep during the day.

They buried him in Ludlow, for some reason. His brother, Laurence (the painter, poet and playwright) brought out More Poems and Additional Poem s after his death. All four books are still read and on sale in the bigger London bookstores, which won't stock anything that isn't guaranteed to turn a penny (or make a quick buck). In England a Housman Society is dedicated to him. Composers such as Vaughan Williams, George Butterworth, John Ireland, Bax and Bliss, and seemingly dozens of others set his poems to music. The music is still played, the songs still sung.

Some found him impossible; he could be cold, cutting, and sarcastic. Others remember him playing with the Master of Trinity's grandchildren (and their toys). His problem was he couldn't relate to others, through shyness or because of what had happened to him. Small talk didn't come easily (didn't in fact come at all), and as a dinner guest his long silences could be a problem. But he was, for example, at ease with his brother, Basil, and his sister-in-law, Jeannie. They therefore knew a different man — a happy, teasing, slightly bantering older brother — and were puzzled by his forbidding reputation. His brother, Laurence, also said of him: 'he had the happiest laugh I've ever heard.' And he was widely known for his wit and humour (albeit waspish, dry, donnish) both in conversation and in the Prefaces to his editions of Lucan, Juvenal and Manilius. Of Merrill's Catullus : 'half the ship's cargo has been thrown overboard to save the bilge water.' Of Jowett's Plato : 'the best translation of a Greek philosopher which has ever been executed by a person who understood neither philosophy nor Greek.' Of Meredith: ' Meredith has never been treated justly. He once wrote admirable books which were not admired. He now writes ridiculous books which are not ridiculed.' 'Any fool can write a sonnet, and most fools do.' And, in a letter; 'Death and marriage are raging though this College with such fury that I ought to be grateful for having escaped both.' But one of them, of course, he couldn't escape from forever; he died in 1936.

Bibliography

A. E. Housman: A Reassessment ed. Alan W Holden & J Roy Birch London:, MacMillan, 2000.

Graves, Richard. Perceval. A. E. Housman: The Scholar-Poet . London: Routledge, 1979.

Housman, A. E. Introductory Lecture 1892 . Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1937.

Housman, A. E. Selected Prose . Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1961.

Housman, Laurence. A E H . London: Jonathan Cape, 1937.

Larkin, Philip. Required Reading . London: Faber and Faber 1983

Page, Norman. A. E. Housman: A Critical Biography . London: MacMillan, 1996.

Richards, Grant. Housman . Oxford: Oxford UP, 1941.

Stoppard, Tom. The Invention of Love Sir . London: Faber & Faber, 1997.

Last modified 8 June 2007

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A. E. Housman

Alfred Edward Housman was born in Fockbury, Worcestershire, England on March 26, 1859 and was the eldest of seven children. A year after his birth, Housman’s family moved to nearby Bromsgrove, where the poet grew up and had his early education. In 1877, he attended St. John’s College, Oxford and received first class honours in classical moderations.

Housman became distracted, however, when he fell in love with his roommate, Moses Jackson. He unexpectedly failed his final exams, but managed to pass the final year and later took a position as clerk in the Patent Office in London for ten years.

During this time, Housman studied Greek and Roman classics intensively, and, in 1892, he was appointed professor of Latin at University College, London. In 1911, he became professor of Latin at Trinity College, Cambridge, a post he held until his death. As a classicist, Housman gained renown for his editions of the Roman poets Juvenal, Lucan, and Manilius, as well as his meticulous and intelligent commentaries, and his disdain for the unscholarly.

Housman only published two volumes of poetry during his life: A Shropshire Lad (1896) and Last Poems (1922). The majority of the poems in A Shropshire Lad , his cycle of sixty-three poems, were written after the death of Adalbert Jackson, Housman’s friend and companion, in 1892. These poems center around themes of pastoral beauty, unrequited love, fleeting youth, grief, death, and the patriotism of the common soldier. After the manuscript had been turned down by several publishers, Housman decided to publish it at his own expense, much to the surprise of his colleagues and students.

While A Shropshire Lad was slow to gain in popularity, the advent of war, first in the Boer War and then in World War I, gave the book widespread appeal due to its nostalgic depiction of brave English soldiers. Several composers created musical settings for Housman’s work, deepening his popularity.

Housman continued to focus on his teaching, but in the early 1920s, when his old friend Moses Jackson was dying, Housman chose to assemble his best unpublished poems so that Jackson might read them. These later poems, most of them written before 1910, exhibit a range of subject and form much greater than the talents displayed in A Shropshire Lad . When Last Poems was published in 1922, it was an immediate success. A third volume, More Poems  (Alfred A. Knopf / Barclay’s), was released posthumously in 1936 by his brother, Laurence, as was an edition of Housman’s Complete Poems (Henry Holt & Company, 1939).

Despite receiving acclaim as a scholar and a poet during his lifetime, Housman lived as a recluse, rejecting honors and avoiding the public eye. He died on April 30, 1936 in Cambridge.

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How A. E. Housman Invented Englishness

In person, A. E. Housman was so shy and furtive that Max Beerbohm once compared him to “an absconding cashier.” For such a crabbed and elusive figure, though, he continues to draw a surprising amount of attention: books, articles, musical tributes, even a Broadway play, Tom Stoppard’s “The Invention of Love.” Academics know him the way he is mostly depicted in that play—as a formidable classicist, probably the greatest of his generation. But the real source of his fame is a single small volume of poetry, “A Shropshire Lad,” which has never been out of print since it was published, in 1896. Somehow, these sixty-three short lyrics, celebrating youth, loss, and early death, became for generations of readers the perfect evocation not merely of what it feels like to be adolescent and a little emotional but of what it means to be English. We don’t have anything remotely like it in American lit. Some of Emily Dickinson’s brief lyrics come closest—tonally, and in their mastery of the short, compressed line—but she has never quite attained Housman’s popularity, and the landscape she wrote about, the one inside her own head, could hardly be said to have created a sense of national identity. “He is a strange phenomenon,” Ted Hughes said of Housman, “but to my mind the most perfect expression of something deeply English and a whole mood of English history.”

Peter Parker’s new book, “Housman Country: Into the Heart of England” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)—which helpfully includes the text of “A Shropshire Lad” in an appendix—is partly a brisk, sensible biography of Housman and partly a study in poetic reputation. It traces the way Housman’s singular vision seized hold of the English imagination, inspiring not just a literary following but a generation of composers, like George Butterworth and Ralph Vaughan Williams, who sought to do musically what Housman had done with verse: to create a new and authentically English kind of song. Parker, the author of very good biographies of J. R. Ackerley and Christopher Isherwood, casts a wide net here, and eventually it unravels in a skein of loose ends and Housmanian magpie-pickings. Parker lists just about all the many authors who ever snatched a title from Housman, for example. He also points out that not only is there an American rock band (formerly Army of Strippers) now called Housman’s Athletes but that the British rocker Morrissey used to quote Housman often and a grateful fan once wrote, “I thought his poems would be drivel about babies and flowers, but it’s really good stuff about suicide.” Parker doesn’t entirely succeed in explaining the great mystery of Housman—why it’s these rueful, corpse-strewn poems and not, say, the heartier ones of John Masefield which continue to resonate within the English soul. But he leaves no doubt about Housman’s lingering attraction. You could conclude from his book that when many people pulled the lever to vote for Brexit they were imagining a return to Shropshire.

To judge from Parker’s account, there were a number of different Housmans, and how you felt about him depended on which one you happened to meet. He was an adventurous eater and a lover of good wine. He liked dirty stories and flying in airplanes. At high table at his Cambridge college, he could be clubbable and amusing, and might even bend your ear about how much he liked the jazz-age novels of Anita Loos. But he could also be rude, aloof, brooding, and difficult. He suffered fools not at all, and was unable to tolerate a compliment. Willa Cather, who so admired his poetry that she made a pilgrimage to meet its author, found him “gaunt and gray, and embittered.” The whole encounter, she said, gave her “a fit of dark depression.” As Housman’s obituary in the London Times put it, “In his attitude to life, there seemed something baffled and even shrinking, as though he feared criticism and emotion alike more than he relished experience. . . . He valued confidence, but held back from intimate relations, and seemed to prefer isolation to giving himself away.”

There was Housman the poet, who actually wrote very little, and Housman the classical scholar, who spent most of his time poring over ancient texts and whose greatest pleasure seemed to come from writing caustic put-downs of other scholars. About an editor of Persius and Juvenal: “Mr. Owen’s innovations, so far as I can see, have only one merit, which certainly, in view of their character, is a merit of some magnitude: they are few.” He sometimes composed these insults in advance, leaving blanks for names he could later plug in. Housman was not a translator or a classical historian. He specialized in the dry-as-dust business of textual criticism, determining the correct version of a classical text by comparing different manuscripts and judging which variant was the most likely—whether in a certain line of Propertius it should be “ et” or “ aut ,” and deciding where the commas belonged in Catullus. His life’s work was a five-volume edition of Manilius, an astrologer poet, who even Housman conceded was third-rate—“facile and frivolous,” he said, remarkable mostly for “doing sums in verse.”

How to square these two, the poet and the pedant, has preoccupied commentators for decades. Edmund Wilson once suggested that what made Housman so adept at textual criticism was his ability to think like a poet, not only like a scholar, and that his fetish for accuracy stemmed from a real passion for his texts. But Wilson also pointed out that in Housman’s choice of Manilius there seems an element of perversity and self-mortification, and that his scholarship sometimes radiated not so much love for literature as hatred for his rivals. The poems in “A Shropshire Lad” are not completely disconnected from Housman’s scholarly work—among other things, they owe something to Horace, Housman’s favorite Latin poet, in particular to Horace’s way of weighting apparently inconsequential words—but they seem to have welled up from another part of him, a spring of emotion that he couldn’t, or didn’t want to, repress. Poetry, he once said, was for him a “morbid secretion,” as the pearl is for the oyster.

Housman never lived in Shropshire, or even spent much time there. He was born in Worcestershire in 1859, the eldest of seven children. His father was a Dickensian figure—a jolly, heavy-drinking lawyer, often broke and given to investing in harebrained schemes. His mother, to whom he was very close, died when Housman was twelve, an experience that turned him into a lifelong atheist. At school, he was an exceptionally gifted student of Latin and Greek, and easily won a classics scholarship to St. John’s College, Oxford, where he sailed through his first set of exams and then spectacularly botched the second. It’s possible that he was rattled by the news that his father had become seriously ill. It’s also possible that he took his success for granted and didn’t study hard enough. The young Housman was a know-it-all, who refused to have anything to do with his tutor after hearing the man mispronounce a Greek word, and even took a dim view of Benjamin Jowett, the famous master of Balliol and the greatest Greek scholar of the day.

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But the more likely cause of Housman’s failure was that he had become emotionally undone over an unrequited yearning for his roommate, Moses Jackson. Jackson was athletic and good-looking, bright enough, but something of a philistine, according to one acquaintance, “quite unliterary and outspoken in his want of any such interest.” Apparently, he had no clue about Housman’s feelings for him. After Oxford, the two men roomed together in London, where they both had jobs at the Patent Office, and where Housman spent every evening at the British Museum, studying on his own, heroically and penitentially, and writing papers that eventually redeemed him as a classicist, landing him professorships first at University College, London, and then at Cambridge. But in 1885 there was a blowup between him and Jackson. Parker speculates that Housman made some sort of declaration and was rejected. Stoppard imagines that it’s Jackson who forces the issue, worried perhaps by the recent passage of a law against acts of “gross indecency” between men. In the play, Jackson is slow to figure things out but finally says, in effect, “You’re not sweet on me, are you?”

Whatever happened, Housman moved out, and Jackson soon married and settled in Karachi. Years later, Housman’s younger brother, Laurence, a novelist and playwright, also gay but much more open about it, suggested that on the rebound Housman found solace in the arms of Jackson’s younger brother, Adalbert. But Laurence was in his nineties then, and this may have been wishful thinking. Despite later rumors about Parisian rent boys and a Venetian gondolier, there’s no sure evidence that Housman ever slept with anyone, and there’s little reason to doubt that Moses Jackson was his only real love. The two men stayed distantly in touch, with Housman becoming a godfather to one of Jackson’s children and lending Jackson a large sum of money when he retired to British Columbia and tried, unsuccessfully, to make it as a farmer there. Housman, after finally overcoming his Oxford failure and achieving distinction as an academic, wrote to Jackson, “I would much rather have followed you round the world and blacked your boots.”

More than half of “A Shropshire Lad” was written during a charged five-month period in 1895, when Housman seems to have been missing Jackson acutely. Readers with advanced gaydar, like Oscar Wilde and E. M. Forster, early on detected a note of suppressed homosexual desire in the book, especially in poems like the one that begins:

Look not in my eyes, for fear  They mirror true the sight I see, And there you find your face too clear  And love it and be lost like me.

The young Forster even wrote Housman a fan letter, and years later, after dining with him at his Cambridge college and hearing Housman say “with a twinkle” that he sometimes went to Paris to be with “unrespectable company,” ventured up the staircase to Housman’s rooms. He slipped his card under the door, but there was no reply.

Parker says that many early readers of Poem No. 44, addressed to a young man who has killed himself rather than face a life of “disgrace and scorn,” would have known that it referred to the well-publicized case of Henry Maclean, a young soldier who shot himself in a London hotel, apparently out of homosexual shame. And he makes the provocative suggestion—which could equally well be applied to other Housman poems, including the strange one that recommends plucking out your eye and cutting off your hand or foot if it offends you—that not every line need be taken at face value and the whole thing might be meant angrily or ironically:

Oh you had forethought, you could reason,  And saw your road and where it led, And early wise and brave in season  Put the pistol to your head.

But one reason “A Shropshire Lad” has been so successful is that readers find there what they want to find. In 1929, a financial expert hired by Housman’s publisher declared that “A Shropshire Lad” was the “filthiest book I have ever read: all about rogering girls under hedges.” During the First World War, British soldiers carried copies in the breast pockets of their tunics, believing the author to be a kindred spirit and a war poet—though Housman knew little about war and soldiering. His main credential was his sense that life passes too quickly and death is always standing by, or, as one of his most famous poems has it:

Here dead we lie because we did not choose To live and shame the land from which we sprung Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose, But young men think it is, and we were young.

After the war, “A Shropshire Lad” travelled in the breast pockets of the generation who had taken up rambling and rediscovering the English countryside, even though—aside from a few place names, like Bredon Hill and Wenlock Edge, evidently chosen more for euphony than for anything else—it’s not much of a geographic guide. The landscape of “A Shropshire Lad” is an all-purpose landscape, not a particular one, and, far from being the unspoiled countryside imagined by Brexiteers, it’s a place mostly of unhappy love and early death. Long past rogering each other, if they ever got that far, most of the Shropshire lads and lasses are already in their graves. Even the poems ostensibly celebrating seasonal rebirth, like the one beginning “Loveliest of trees, the cherry now / Is hung with bloom along the bough,” contain within them, like a canker, a note of foreboding, and wind up sounding like laments.

Housman’s morbidness so bothered Ezra Pound that he wrote a famous parody:

O woe, woe. People are born and die We also shall be dead pretty soon. Therefore let us act as if we were         dead already.

What Pound missed was Housman’s music, which so lent itself to composers—the intensity of his tone and the tautness and compactness of his expression. Parker sees Housman’s habit of plainness and terseness as manifestations of English traits that amount to a sort of polite national understatement: modesty, restraint, stiff-upper-lipness. Housman is tight-lipped, certainly, but that doesn’t account for the feeling you sometimes get that the poems are so repressed they ought to bear warning signs like those found on tanker trucks: “Caution: Contents Under Pressure.”

Housman insisted that the task of poetry was “to transfuse emotion—not to transmit thought”; it was to make your throat clench and your hair stand on end. The emotion his own poetry most often elicits is that of overwhelming sadness. Parker sees him, quite rightly, as belonging to the long tradition of English melancholia, but despite the sometimes old-fashioned ways in which it is framed—the lads and lasses, the ploughed fields, the shimmering weirs—Housman’s melancholy is a more angsty, modern version, untethered from any religious or artistic consolation. He’s less like Keats, say, than like Hardy, his near-contemporary, whose bleakness, both personal and poetic, at times outdoes even Housman’s. (Hardy once wrote to Rider Haggard, after the death of Haggard’s ten-year-old son, “To be candid I think the death of a child is never really to be regretted, when one reflects on what he has escaped.”)

Some of Housman’s brand of sadness also carries over into the poetry of Philip Larkin, who was an admirer, especially in poems like “Cut Grass” and “The Trees,” which borrow the characteristic Housman form of short lines in just a few stanzas. In some ways, even Larkin’s life mirrors Housman’s: the small output of poems fastidiously worked over, the seemingly dull career as an academic librarian, the solitary bachelor flat (though we now know, of course, that he wasn’t nearly as lonely and sex-starved as he pretended). It’s not hard to imagine the two of them huddled over a couple of pints and taking great pleasure in reminding each other of all the ways in which the world is going to hell.

Loss, weariness, diminishment, the sense of a golden age long gone—you could make a case that for the past hundred and twenty years or so this has been the authentic, dominant note of Englishness in poetry, more than a wistful, Brexity yearning for a pastoral countryside. Part of Housman’s charm, even now, is the way he makes that sadness sound and feel so sweet:

Into my heart an air that kills  From yon far country blows: What are those blue remembered hills  What spires, what farms are those?

That is the land of lost content.  I see it shining plain, The happy highways where I went  And cannot come again.

But that sweetness, verging on sentimentality, is also Housman’s limitation: the lads and lasses slumbering under the grass, never growing old or sick or worrying about how to find a job. Sadness in Housman is a one-size-fits-all emotion, not one rooted in particulars. It puddles up automatically. And reading “A Shropshire Lad” you can find yourself becoming narcotized against feelings that are deeper and more complicated. That may be the real secret of the book’s enduring popularity, the way it substitutes for a feeling of genuine loss the almost pleasant pain of nostalgia. ♦

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• A E Housman

B. 1859 D. 1936

The sum of things to be known is inexhaustible, and however long we read, we shall never come to the end of our story-book.

Alfred Edward Housman, the eldest son of a Bromsgrove solicitor, was born in 1859. He attended Bromsgrove School as a dayboy, but soon after he started there his mother fell ill and his father sank into helpless despondency; as the eldest child, Housman was closest to his mother and spent many hours with her in her final illness. As the school holidays approached it was decided that he should go away for a while to visit family friends; he was with them when he heard the news of his mother’s death. He later said that this bereavement at the age of twelve, which shadowed his whole life, cost him his belief in any kind of religious faith.

In 1877 he went to St John’s College, Oxford, having won a scholarship to read Classics. Here he formed a passionate attachment to Moses Jackson, an outstanding student of science and a natural athlete; Jackson had good looks and, in the phrase of the time, manly bearing. Housman lived in a time when he could not reveal his deepest feelings for Jackson, and he may even not have admitted them to himself. Many years later, those suppressed feelings found expression at last in his verse.

At the end of his second year, Housman gained a First in Moderations and was expected to perform brilliantly in his final examination, Greats. Perhaps distracted by inner turmoil, or because he had followed his own academic interests and avoided the reading required by the syllabus, he failed outright. He left Oxford without a degree.

For the next ten years he worked as a clerk in the Patent Office, spending his leisure hours in the British Museum continuing his studies in Latin and Greek. For a while he shared rooms in London with Moses Jackson, but in 1887 Jackson married and emigrated to India. Housman began writing poems in his notebook; eventually, in 1896, he published, at his own expense, a collection of 63 of them under the title A Shropshire Lad .

At first the poems attracted little notice, though one reviewer praised their ‘exquisite simplicity’. Their themes – the loss of youth, violent death, the parting of friends – are well suited to the ballad form in which most of them are written. Set in a half-imaginary Shropshire, a nostalgic ‘land of lost content’, they are often addressed to, or spoken by, a soldier or a boy farmer. At the outbreak of war in 1914 Housman’s poems suddenly became popular, striking a powerful emotional chord with a nation losing its young men to the trenches.

Meanwhile his growing reputation as a brilliant Classics Scholar had led to Housman’s appointment in 1892 as Professor of Latin at London University, and later at Cambridge. Moses Jackson died overseas in 1923 and, from that date, Houseman wrote no more poems. His teaching and scholarship continued, however, until 1936, the year he died in his Trinity Great Court rooms.

Poems by A E Housman

Tell me not here, it needs not saying, read by andrew motion.

by A E Housman

Tell Me Not Here, It Needs Not Saying - A E Housman - Read by Andrew Motion

A shropshire lad ii: loveliest of trees, the cherry now, read by alan brownjohn, a shropshire lad ii: loveliest of trees, the cherry now - a e housman - read by alan brownjohn, a shropshire lad xxxi: on wenlock edge, a shropshire lad xxxi: on wenlock edge - a e housman - read by alan brownjohn, a e housman in the poetry store, a e housman downloads read by kit wright.

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Books by A E Housman

The collected poems of a. e. housman, a. e. housman: a shropshire lad and other poems, related links.

The Housman Society

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