A. E. Housman
1859–1936
Biography
Alfred Edward Housman (1859–1936) was an English classical scholar and poet. He failed his final examination at Oxford, and for years afterwards he worked as a patent examiner in London, pursuing textual criticism of Latin and Greek texts in his spare time. That scholarship earned him a professorship of Latin at University College London in 1892, and in 1911 he became Kennedy Professor of Latin at Cambridge. His editions of Juvenal, Manilius and Lucan are still treated as authoritative, and he is counted among the foremost classical scholars of his age.
His fame as a poet rests mainly on A Shropshire Lad, published in 1896. This cycle of short poems is marked by pessimism and a preoccupation with early death, and much of it is set in the countryside of Shropshire, the county that gives the book its name. Its readership grew gradually, and it found a particular audience among younger readers during the First World War. Many of its poems were later set to music, and his verse proved popular with composers. A second collection, Last Poems, appeared in 1922, and More Poems, gathered from his notebooks by his brother Laurence, was published after his death in 1936.
One of his books is on this site: A Shropshire Lad. It is the collection through which most readers meet him. It sets its melancholy about youth and mortality against the rural landscape of the West Midlands, with its woods, hills and fields, in a plain and memorable verse form. Several of its poems are among the most frequently anthologised in English, which is a fair measure of how far a classical scholar's precision could be turned to very different ends.
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Books
A Shropshire Lad
by A. E. Housman
Sixty-three short poems of A. E. Housman's 1896 volume mourn young men who die early, soldiers, ploughboys and lovers, in the setting of the Shropshire hills and the market towns. They include 'Loveliest of trees', 'To an Athlete Dying Young' and 'Is my team ploughing'.
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.