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Alfred Edward Housman (26 March 1859 – 30 April 1936)
Usually known as A. E. Housman, was an English classical scholar and poet,
best known to the general public for his cycle of poems A Shropshire Lad.
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.
Housman was counted one of the foremost classicists of his age, and has
been ranked as one of the greatest scholars of all 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.
Housman was born in Fockbury, a hamlet on the outskirts of Bromsgrove in
Worcestershire, the eldest of seven children of a country solicitor. His mother
died on his twelfth birthday, and subsequently her place was taken by his
stepmother Lucy, an elder cousin of his father's whom he latter married in
1873. His brother Laurence Housman and sister Clemence Housman also
became writers.
Housman was educated first at King Edward's School, Birmingham, then
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withdrawn, Housman formed strong friendships with two roommates, Moses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 first class 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 even a pass degree. Though some
explain Housman's unexpected failure in his final exams as due to 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.
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 in 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. He gradually
acquired such a high reputation that in 1892 he was offered the
professorship of Latin at UCL, which he accepted. Many years later, the UCL
Academic Staff Common Room was dedicated to his memory as the
Housman Room.
Although Housman's sphere of responsibilities as professor included both
Latin and Greek, he put most of his energy into the study of Latin classics. In
1911 he took the Kennedy Professorship of Latin at Trinity College,
Cambridge, where he remained for the rest of his life. It was unusual at the
time for an Oxford man such as Housman to be appointed to a post at
Cambridge. During 1903–1930, he published his critical edition of Manilius's
Astronomicon in five 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[citation needed]. To
his students he appeared as a severe, reticent, remote authority. However,
quite contrary to his usual outward appearance, he allowed himself several
hedonistic pleasures: he enjoyed gastronomy and flying in airplanes and
frequently visited 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".
Housman found his true vocation in classical studies and treated poetry as a
secondary activity. He never spoke about his poetry in public until 1933
when he gave a lecture, The Name and Nature of Poetry, in which he argued
that poetry should appeal to emotions rather than to the intellect. He died,
aged 77, three years later in Cambridge. His ashes are buried near St
Laurence's Church, Ludlow, Shropshire.
Poetry
A Shropshire Lad
During his years in London, A. E. 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. At first 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.
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 thirty
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 consistency 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 his death
Housman's 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.
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 himself 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."
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 Moses
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").
Housman in other art forms
Housman's poetry, especially A Shropshire Lad, provided texts for a
significant number of British, and in particular English, composers in the first
half of the 20th century. The national, pastoral and traditional elements of
his style resonated with similar trends in English music. The first 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 six 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 (first 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
originated from shell-shock. Hence the fatalistic strain of the poems, and the
earlier settings, foreshadowed responses to the universal bereavement of the
First World 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 six 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 the 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.
Works titled after Housman
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 seventh 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 first 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".
Eserleri:
A Shropshire Lad (1896)
Last Poems (1922)
A Shropshire Lad: Authorized Edition: Henry Holt and Company (1924)
More Poems (1936)
Collected Poems: Henry Holt and Company (1940)
Collected Poems (1939)
Manuscript Poems: Eight Hundred Lines of Hitherto Un-collected Verse from
the Author's Notebooks (1955)
Is My Team Ploughing
Unkind to Unicorns: Selected Comic Verse (1995; 2nd ed. 1999)
The Poems of A.E. Housman (1997)
The Land of Lost Content a poem by Alfred Edward Housman
When I Was One-And-Twenty by A E Housman - Poetry Reading
When I Was One-and-Twenty by A. E. Housman - Poem with Text
Alfred edward housman | ALFRED EDWARD HOUSMAN definition
Here Dead We Lie - A Poem By Alfred Edward Housman - Read By James Leeper
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When I was one-and-twenty by Alfred Edward Housman | Poem recitation
Her Strong Enchantments Failing by Alfred Edward Housman
"To An Athlete Dying Young" by A E Housman (read by Tom O'Bedlam)
"When I was one-and-twenty" by Alfred Edward Housman. Watching Art 45
Jannis Kounellis and Alfred Edward Housman.
Here Dead We Lie (by Alfred Edward Housman)
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"Along the Field As We Came By" by Alfred Edward Housman
Alfred Edward Housman - Spring Morning
"When I Was One-And-Twenty" by A E Housman
A Shropshire Lad by Alfred Edward Housman
"Tell me not here, it needs not saying" By A. E. Housman Poem animation
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March By Alfred Edward Houseman
A Shropshire Lad - A.E. Housman
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'A Shropshire Lad' - A. E. Housman. Radio Play/Documentary.
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Infant Innocence, by A. E. Housman
Oh Stay At Home, My Lad, and Plough
How to pronounce Alfred Edward Housman in English?
Loveliest Of Trees. Poem by A. E. Housman