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Housman, A. E.
Also known as: Alfred Edward Housman
Born: 1859 Died: 1936
British poet
From: A. E. Housman, Bloom's Major Poets.
Alfred Edward Housman was born on March 26, 1859 in Fockbury, England. In his early childhood,
the family moved to Catshill, Worcestershire, within sight of the Shropshire hills. Housman was
the oldest of seven siblings, among whom included Laurence, who became a well-known
dramatist, and his sister Clemence, who became a novelist and short-story writer. When
Housman was twelve, his mother died, initiating a gradual but definitive loss of religious faith; his
disillusioned atheism would become a great influence on his poetry. He attended the Bromsgrove
School, well known for its classical curriculum, and between 1877–1881, St. John's College,
Oxford, where he read Classics, another significant poetic influence. Although Housman gained
honors for his first examination in Classics, he failed in his final examination—Greats, or Litterae
Humaniores— in 1881, and left Oxford that summer without a final degree.
After returning to Oxford in the fall of that year to earn a "pass" degree, Housman took the Civil
Service Exam. He then moved to London to work in the Royal Patent Office. During this time,
Housman continued to read and study Classics in the British Museum. This proved fruitful, for he
published widely on the subject, and became a formidable classical scholar during the ten years
he worked as a civil servant. In 1892, Housman was appointed Professor of Latin at University
College, London, where he taught until 1911. Despite his reclusive nature, during the latter part
of his career at UCL, Housman socialized regularly with a small and select number of friends, who
included his brother Laurence and his publisher Grant Richards. Known to be a connoisseur of fine
food and wine, and a brilliant and witty conversationalist, he nevertheless continued to isolate
himself from the London literati, and had little interest in his contemporary writers, such as Eliot,
Yeats, and Joyce. In 1911, Housman was elected Kennedy Professor of Latin at Cambridge
University, and became a Fellow of Trinity College. He gained acceptance to an elite faculty
clique at Cambridge, but true to his nature, refrained from developing any close relationships
there. Housman continued to teach at Cambridge through the mid-nineteen-thirties. Longsuffering from heart disease, he died in Cambridge on October 30, 1936.
In 1896, the first edition of A Shropshire Lad was published, not long after Housman's difficulties
at Oxford. He later described this period as one of "continuous excitement"; in this phase of
industrious activity, he wrote both A Shropshire Lad and many of the verses that would appear
later in Last Poems. Housman's baffling failure at Oxford was subject to much speculation both
before and after his death. His diaries later revealed that during this period he had become
extremely despondent over a relationship with a fellow student, Moses Jackson, with whom he
shared rooms. In 1882, Housman again shared lodgings in London with Jackson and Jackson's
brother, Adalbert. There has been some speculation that he had romantic attachments to both
men. However, Housman's realization of his homosexuality, coupled with Moses Jackson's
rejection, threw him into a state of reclusiveness and introversion, which would come to
predominate both his life and his poetry. Indeed, Housman's contemporaries described him as an
"enigmatic personality burdened by a private grief."
During his years in the Civil Service, at UCL, and at Cambridge, Housman published prolifically on
classical literature, translated and edited the works of major classical writers, and produced
literary criticism as well, including The Name and the Nature of Poetry. Yet his poetic oeuvre was
relatively small. He was quoted by his publisher Grant Richards to declare "I am not a poet by
trade. I am a professor of Latin." Undeniably, Housman's poetic productivity declined significantly
after the publication of A Shropshire Lad. However, in 1922, twenty-six years after A Shropshire
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Lad —and the same year of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land —he published Last Poems. Many of the
poems in this volume were written in the 1890's. Other poems reflect the Edwardian period, and
still others, the Boer War—in which his younger brother Herbert was killed—and World War I. By
its very title, it is clear that Housman intended this volume of poems to serve as an epitaph to
his poetic career.
However, in 1936, Housman's brother Laurence posthumously edited and published More Poems,
followed in 1937 with a memoir that included Additional Poems. Nearly all of the pieces in these
volumes were written during Housman's most prolific period, but not included in the earlier
publications. As his brother's literary executor, Laurence chose to publish some of Housman's
most emotionally frank poems. He justified this by claiming that he had the power and
responsibility to do for his brother in death what Housman could not, or would not, do for himself
in life. Several of the poems in More Poems refer openly to Housman's homosexuality and
describe a thwarted romantic relationship. Given his emotional and social reticence, it is no
wonder that Housman suppressed these poems during his lifetime.
Socially reclusive yet well-traveled; cold in manner yet passionate in temperament; a prominent,
influential scholar and critic who routinely declined honors and awards; a sharp, sparkling
conversationalist who wrote spare, taciturn verse, Housman seemed an aggregate of paradoxes
in his lifetime, and today he remains an enigmatic figure in English literary history. Such
irreconcilable differences are evident in Housman's small but powerful body of work as well. A
Shropshire Lad's simplicity of subject, introspective tone, and restrained feeling belies its
sophisticated prosody, plurality of voice, and emotional complexity. Its more superficial qualities
made the work unlike most contemporaneous late-Victorian verse, and A Shropshire Lad was not
an immediate best-seller. Nevertheless, over time its popularity, and that of its author, grew. By
the time of Last Poems's publication in 1922, Alfred Edward Housman had become one of the
most widely-read poets of his generation.
Citation Information
Text Citation (Chicago Manual of Style format): Bloom, Harold, ed. "Housman, A. E." A. E. Housman,
Bloom's Major Poets. Philadelphia: C helsea House Publishing, 2003. Bloom's Literary Reference Online. Facts On
File, Inc. http://www.fofweb.com/activelink2.asp?ItemID=WE54&SID=&iPin=BMPAEH02&SingleRecord=True
(accessed April 25, 2013).
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American Psychological Association (APA) Format
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