Housman, A(lfred) E(dward)

Housman, A(lfred) E(dward) (1859-1936), English poet and Classical scholar. Housman was born in Bromsgrove, Worcestershire, and educated at the University of Oxford. Although a brilliant student, he failed his finals, shocking his professors and contemporaries, and became a clerk in the patent office in London. After ten years as a civil servant, during which time he published articles on many Classical authors, Housman became Professor of Latin at University College, London (1892-1911) and at the University of Cambridge (1911-1936). Considered one of the foremost Classical scholars of his time, he wrote extensively for Classical journals and prepared editions of the works of the Latin poets Juvenal, Lucan, and Manilius.

Housman is best known, however, as the author of a few slim volumes of poetry remarkable for their simple diction, lyric beauty, and gentle, ironic pessimism. Set in the English countryside, the poems express the regrets and frustration of young men, especially soldiers. A favourite theme is fleeting youth, as in the famous poem “When I Was One and Twenty”. In technique, the poems combine elements of the Classical ode and the English ballad. Housman’s first volume of poetry, A Shropshire Lad (1896), was slow in gaining recognition but became hugely popular during World War I. A series of 63 nostalgic verses, it is now the work for which Housman is chiefly remembered. By the time his second book, Last Poems (1922), was published, however, the individuality and quality of his work were widely appreciated, and the new volume was an immediate success. It contains Housman’s unmistakable blend of lyrically expressed despair and disappointment:

More Poems appeared in 1936 and Collected Poems in 1940.