Alfred Edward "A. E." HOUSMAN

1859 - 1936  (77 years)

• Name	Alfred Edward "A. E." HOUSMAN
  Birth	26 Mar 1859	Fockbury, Worcestershire, England
  Christening	24 Apr 1859	Catshill, Worcestershire, England
  Gender	Male
  Name	A. E. HOUSMAN
  Death	1 May 1936	Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, England
  Notes	(1) Source: Graves, Richard Perceval, A. E. Housman: The Scholar-Poet, London, England: Taylor & Francis, 1979, p. 4. (2) "A.E. Housman," Encyclopædia Brittanica, 2010, © 2010 Encyclopædia Brittanica, Inc.: A.E. Housman, in full Alfred Edward Housman (b. March 26, 1859, Fockbury, Worcestershire, Eng. - d. April 30, 1936, Cambridge), 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. (3) Obituary, The New York Times, May 2, 1936: A.E. HOUSMAN DEAD; POET AND SCHOLAR Two Slender Books, in 1896 and 1922, Won Fame for Shropshire Writer. TAUGHT LATIN FOR YEARS Held Chair at Cambridge Since 1911-Noted as Editor of Texts of Juvenal and Lucan. Wireless to THE NEW YORK TIMES. LONDON, May 1.-A.E. Housman, author of "A Shropshire Lad," died in Cambridge today at the age of 77. He had held a professorship in Latin at Cambridge University since 1911. He was unmarried and lived in rooms at the college. The manuscript of "A Shropshire Lad" is in the college library. A poet and scholar in the great English tradition, his reputation rests on his volumes, "A Shropshire Lad," published in 1896, and "Last Poems," published twenty-six years later, in 1922. In the preface to the latter book, Housman announced his decision to write no more poetry. "I can no longer expect to be revisited by the continuous excitement under which in the early months of 1895 I wrote the greater part of my other book, nor indeed could I ever sustain it if it came, and it is best that what I have written should be printed while I'm here to see it through the press and control its spelling and punctuation." He began work as a clerk in the patent office, serving for ten years. He was one of the few Oxford men to hold a Cambridge professorship. His brother, Laurence Housman, is the author of the play, "Victoria Regina," and is a much more prolific writer. Shy and Retiring Professor Few persons, relatively, among the thousands who were charmed by delicate poems of Alfred Edward Housman realized that the author of "A Shropshire Lad" was a rather shy Professor of Latin. He had taught for more than four decades, first at University College, London, and since 1911 at Cambridge. Some one said of him that he was "a typical Cambridge don, prim in his manner, silent and rather shy, conventional in dress and manner, learned, accurate and well-informed." Beneath that austere portrait of the scholar who edited Manilius, Juvenal and Lucan was revealed his alter ego who could-and did-describe in lines that made the English language beautiful the emotions of youth uprooted. Housman's poems are today to be found in most homes of culture. Both his "Shropshire Lad" and "Last Poems" are marked by tenderness of expression, purity of style and simplicity. His moods were poignantly reflected in those ninety-odd poems of his first volume. Generally they were melancholy in tone, nostalgic in the extreme, though at times, as in "Reveille," bursting with the enthusiasm of life and youth: Wake: the silver dusk returning Up the beach of darkness brims, And the ship of sunrise burning Strands upon the eastern rims. On rare occasions would he forsake library and lecture room to revisit the scenes of his boyhood and dream on the Shropshire hills and moors. The English that was in him forbade any display of visible emotion; he was severe, almost forbidding in manner, though kind and gentle to his students and friends. Typical of his lyrics is the eight-line poem which has thrilled the world where English is spoken: When I was one-and-twenty I heard a wise man say: "Give crowns and pounds and guineas But not your heart away; Give pearls away and rubies But keep your fancy free." But I was one-and-twenty, No use to talk to me. When I was one-and-twenty I heard him say again: "The heart out of the bosom Was never given in vain; 'Tis paid with sighs aplenty And sold for endless rue." And I am two-and-twenty, And oh, 'tis true, 'tis true. Told How He Wrote Poetry Disdaining publicity and hiding as best he could from the public eye, Housman unbent a few years ago to explain how he wrote his poetry. "Having drunk a pint of beer," he said in a lecture "On the Name and Nature of Poetry" at Cambridge, "I would go out for a walk of two or three hours. As I went along, thinking of nothing in particular, only looking at things around me and following the progress of the seasons, there would flow into my mind, with sudden and unaccountable emotion, sometime a line or two of verse, sometimes a whole stanza at once, accompanied, not preceded, by a vague notion of the poems which they were destined to form part of. "Then there would usually be a lull of an hour or so, then perhaps the spring would bubble up again. I say bubble up, because, so far as I could make out, the source of the suggestions thus proffered to the brain was an abyss which I have already had occasion to mention-the pit of the stomach. "When I got home I wrote them down, leaving gaps and hoping that further inspiration might be forthcoming another day. Sometimes it was, if I took my walks in a receptive and expectant frame of mind; but sometimes the poem had to be taken in hand and completed by the brain, which was apt to be a matter of trouble and anixety [sic], involving trial and disappointment and sometimes ending in failure. "I have seldom written poetry unless I was rather out of health and the experience, though pleasurable, was generally agitating and exhausting." "A Shropshire Lad" was published in 1896 and soon drew flattering attention to the author. It was not until 1922, however, that his "Last Poems," forty-one of them, appeared. The long intervening years had not changed his style nor his nostalgia for passing things. Men of letters have marveled at his simplicity and directness, as in the following: The laws of God, the laws of man, He may keep that will and can; Not I; let God and man decree Laws for themselves and not for me; And if my ways are not theirs Let them mind their own affairs. Please yourselves, say I, and they Need only look the other way. Born in Shropshire [sic; should be Worcestershire], he attended Bromsgrove School and then went to St. John's College, Oxford, receiving his M.A. degree in 1882. For ten years after that he held the drab position of clerk in the British Patent Office, studying the classics at night and breaking away to academic life in 1892, when he was appointed Professor of Latin at University College in London. For the last twenty-five years he had been Professor of Latin at Cambridge. He was an honorary Fellow of St. John's College, Oxford, and a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. Edited Manilius in Five Parts What is regarded as his greatest scholarly work was his editing of Manilius, published in five parts, in 1903, 1912, 1916, 1920 and 1931. In 1905 he edited Juvenal and in 1926 the works of Lucan. Revealing were his definitions of true poetry. "I think," he wrote, "that to transfuse emotion-not to transmit thought, but to set up in the reader's sense a vibration corresponding to what was felt by the writer-is the peculiar function of poetry. The eighteenth century poets were dominated by reason. Poetry did not rise spontaneously in their hearts, as true poetry must; and the result was that they wrote mere verse. "Either they had things to say, which is likely to be death to poetry, or they concentrated their attention upon form, which is as fatal." His favorite poets of the eighteenth century were Collins, Christopher Smart, Cowper and Blake. "And what characteristics had these four in common? They were mad!" Acutely sensitive and refreshingly free from sentimentality is the little poem which is hard to forget: With rue my heart is laden For golden friends I had. For many a rose-lipt maiden And many a lightfoot lad. By brooks too broad for leaping The lightfoot lads are laid; The rose-lipt girls are sleeping In fields where roses fade. Among the few lesser known writings of Housman is the following parody: O why do you walk through the fields in boots Missing so much and so much. O fat white woman whom nobody shoots, Why do you walk through the fields in boots When the grass is soft as the breast of coots And shivering sweet to the touch. O why do you walk through the fields in boots?
  Person ID	I18568	Frost, Gilchrist and Related Families
  Last Modified	23 Dec 2023

  
  

  Father	Edward HOUSMAN,   b. Bef 10 Mar 1831, Kinver, Staffordshire, England d. 1894 (Age > 62 years)
  Mother	Sarah Jane WILLIAMS,   b. 1828   d. 1871 (Age 43 years)
  Marriage	17 Jun 1858	Woodchester, Gloucestershire, England
  Family ID	F8274	Group Sheet  |  Family Chart

  
  

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