A. E. Housman | |
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 Housman in 1910 | |
| Born | Alfred Edward Housman (1859-03-26)26 March 1859 Bromsgrove, Worcestershire, England |
| Died | 30 April 1936(1936-04-30) (aged 77) Cambridge, England |
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| Alma mater | St John's College, Oxford |
| Genre | Lyric poetry |
| Notable works | A Shropshire Lad |
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Alfred Edward Housman (/ˈhaʊsmən/; 26 March 1859 – 30 April 1936) was an Englishclassical scholar and poet. He showed early promise as a student at theUniversity of Oxford, but he failed his final examination inliterae humaniores and took employment as apatent examiner in London in 1882. In his spare time he engaged intextual criticism of classicalGreek andLatin texts, and his publications as an independent researcher earned him a high academic reputation and appointment as professor of Latin atUniversity College London in 1892. In 1911 he became theKennedy Professor of Latin at theUniversity of Cambridge. Today he is regarded as one of the foremost classicists of his age and one of the greatest classical scholars of any time.[1][2] His editions ofJuvenal,Manilius, andLucan are still considered authoritative.
In 1896, Housman publishedA Shropshire Lad, a cycle of poems marked by the author's pessimism and preoccupation with early death, which gradually acquired a wide readership and appealed particularly to a younger audience duringWorld War I. Another collection, entitledLast Poems, appeared in 1922. Housman's poetry became popular formusical settings. Following his death, further poems from his notebooks were published by his brotherLaurence.
The eldest of seven children, Housman was born at Valley House in Fockbury, a hamlet on the outskirts ofBromsgrove in Worcestershire, to Sarah Jane (née Williams, married 17 June 1858 inWoodchester, Gloucester)[3] and Edward Housman (whose family came fromLancaster), and was baptised on 24 April 1859 at Christ Church, inCatshill.[4][5][6] His mother died on his twelfth birthday, and his father, a country solicitor, thenmarried an elder cousin, Lucy, in 1873. Two of his siblings became prominent writers, sisterClemence Housman and brotherLaurence Housman.
Housman was educated atKing Edward's School inBirmingham and laterBromsgrove School, where he revealed his academic promise and won prizes for his poems.[6][7] In 1877, he won an open scholarship toSt John's College, Oxford, and went there to studyclassics.[6] Althoughintroverted by nature, Housman formed strong friendships with two roommates, Moses John Jackson (1858 – 14 January 1923) andA. W. Pollard. Though Housman obtained a first in classicalModerations in 1879, his dedication to textual analysis led him to neglect the ancient history and philosophy that formed part of theGreats curriculum. Accordingly, he failed hisFinals and had to return humiliated inMichaelmas term to resit the exam and at least gain a lower-levelpass degree.[8][6] Though some attribute Housman's unexpected performance in his exams directly to his unrequited feelings for Jackson,[9] most biographers adduce more obvious causes. Housman was indifferent to philosophy and overconfident in his exceptional gifts, and he spent too much time with his friends. He may also have been distracted by news of his father's desperate illness.[10][11][12]
After Oxford, Jackson went to work as aclerk in thePatent Office in London and he also arranged a job there for Housman.[6] The two shared a flat at 82 Talbot Road,[13]Bayswater, with Jackson's brother Adalbert until 1885, when Housman moved to lodgings of his own, probably after Jackson responded to a declaration of love by telling Housman that he could not reciprocate his feelings.[14] Two years later, Jackson moved to India, placing more distance between himself and Housman. When he returned briefly to England in 1889 to marry, Housman was not invited to the wedding and knew nothing about it until the couple had left the country. Adalbert Jackson died in 1892 and Housman commemorated him in a poem published as "XLII – A.J.J." ofMore Poems (1936).
Meanwhile, Housman pursued his classical studies independently, and published scholarly articles onHorace,Propertius,Ovid,Aeschylus,Euripides andSophocles.[6] He also completed an edition ofPropertius, which however was rejected by bothOxford University Press andMacmillan in 1885, and was destroyed after his death. He gradually acquired such a high reputation that in 1892 he was offered and accepted the professorship of Latin atUniversity College London (UCL).[6] When, during his tenure, an immensely rareCoverdale Bible of 1535 was discovered in the UCL library and presented to the Library Committee, Housman (who had become an atheist while at Oxford)[15] remarked that it would be better to sell it to "buy some really useful books with the proceeds".[16]
Although Housman's early work and his responsibilities as a professor included bothLatin andGreek, he began to specialise in Latin poetry. When asked later why he had stopped writing about Greek verse, he responded, "I found that I could not attain to excellence in both."[17] In 1911 he took theKennedy Professorship of Latin atTrinity College, Cambridge, where he remained for the rest of his life.
Between 1903 and 1930, Housman published his critical edition ofManilius'sAstronomicon in five volumes. He also editedJuvenal (1905) andLucan (1926). G. P. Goold, Classics Professor at University College, wrote of his predecessor's accomplishments that "the legacy of Housman's scholarship is a thing of permanent value; and that value consists less in obvious results, the establishment of general propositions about Latin and the removal of scribal mistakes, than in the shining example he provides of a wonderful mind at work … He was and may remain the last great textual critic".[2] In the eyes ofHarry Eyres, however, Housman was "famously dry" as a professor, and his influence led to a scholarly style in the study of literature and poetry that was philological and without emotion.[18]
Many colleagues were unnerved by Housman's scathing attacks on those he thought guilty of shoddy scholarship.[6] In his paper "The Application of Thought to Textual Criticism" (1921) he wrote: "A textual critic engaged upon his business is not at all likeNewton investigating the motion of the planets: he is much more like a dog hunting for fleas". He declared many of his contemporary scholars to be stupid, lazy, vain, or all three, saying: "Knowledge is good, method is good, but one thing beyond all others is necessary; and that is to have a head, not a pumpkin, on your shoulders, and brains, not pudding, in your head".[2][19]
His younger colleague,A. S. F. Gow, quoted examples of these attacks, noting that they "were often savage in the extreme".[20] Gow also related how Housman intimidated students, sometimes reducing the women to tears. According to Gow, Housman could never remember the names of female students, maintaining that "had he burdened his memory by the distinction between Miss Jones and Miss Robinson, he might have forgotten that between the second and fourth declension". Among the more notable students at his Cambridge lectures wasEnoch Powell,[21] one of whose own Classical emendations was later complimented by Housman.[22]
In his private life, Housman enjoyed country walks,gastronomy, air travel and making frequent visits to France, where he read "books which were banned in Britain as pornographic"[23] but he struckA. C. Benson, a fellow don, as being "descended from a long line of maiden aunts".[24] His feelings about his poetry were ambivalent and he certainly treated it as secondary to his scholarship. He did not speak in public about his poems until 1933, when he gave a lecture "The Name and Nature of Poetry", arguing there that poetry should appeal to emotions rather than to the intellect.
Housman died, aged 77, in Cambridge. His ashes are buried just outsideSt Laurence's Church, Ludlow. A cherry tree was planted there in his memory (seeA Shropshire Lad II) and replaced by the Housman Society in 2003 with a new cherry tree nearby.[6][25]
Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.
Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.
And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.[26]
During his years in London, Housman completedA Shropshire Lad, a cycle of 63 poems. After one publisher had turned it down, he helped subsidise its publication in 1896. At first selling slowly, it rapidly became a lasting success. Its appeal to English musicians had helped to make it widely known beforeWorld War I, when its themes struck a powerful chord with English readers. The book has been in print continuously since May 1896.[27]
The poems are marked by pessimism and preoccupation with death, without religious consolation (Housman had become an atheist while still an undergraduate). Housman wrote many of them while living inHighgate, London, before ever visiting Shropshire, which he presented in an idealised pastoral light as his 'land of lost content'.[28] Housman himself acknowledged that "No doubt I have been unconsciously influenced by the Greeks and Latins, but [the] chief sources of which I am conscious are Shakespeare's songs, the Scottish Border ballads, andHeine".[29]
Housman began collecting a new set of poems after the First World War. His early work was an influence on many Britishpoets who became famous by their writing about the war, and he wrote several poems as occasional verse to commemorate the war dead. This included hisEpitaph on an Army of Mercenaries, honouring theBritish Expeditionary Force, an elite but small force of professional soldiers sent to Belgium at the start of the war. 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.[6] These later poems, mostly written before 1910, show a greater variety of subject and form than those inA Shropshire Lad but lack its consistency. He published his new collection asLast Poems (1922), feeling that his inspiration was exhausted and that he should not publish more in his lifetime.
After Housman's death in 1936, his brother,Laurence published further poems inMore Poems (1936),A. E .H.: Some Poems, Some Letters and a Personal Memoir by his Brother (1937), andCollected Poems (1939).A. E. H. includes humorous verse such as a parody ofLongfellow's poemExcelsior. Housman also wrote a parodicFragment of a Greek Tragedy, in English, first published in 1883 inThe Bromsgrovian, the magazine of his old school, and frequently reprinted.[30][31]
John Sparrow quoted a letter written late in Housman's life that described the genesis of his poems:
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.[32]
Sparrow himself adds, "How difficult it is to achieve a satisfactory analysis may be judged by considering the last poem inA 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."[32]
In 1942, Laurence Housman also deposited an essay entitled "A. E. Housman's 'De Amicitia'" in theBritish 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 Moses Jackson.[33] Despite the conservative nature of the times and his own caution in public life, Housman was quite open in his poetry, and especially inA Shropshire Lad, about his deeper sympathies. Poem XXX 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". InMore Poems, he buries his love for Moses Jackson in the very act of commemorating it, as his feelings of love are not reciprocated and must be carried unfulfilled to the grave:[34]
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;
"Good-bye," 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.[35]
His poem "Oh who is that young sinner with the handcuffs on his wrists?", written after the trial ofOscar Wilde, addressed more general attitudes towards homosexuals.[36] In the poem the prisoner is suffering "for the colour of his hair", a natural quality that, in a coded reference to homosexuality, is reviled as "nameless and abominable" (recalling the legal phrasepeccatum illud horribile, inter Christianos non nominandum, "that horrible sin, not to be named amongst Christians").
Housman's poetry, especiallyA Shropshire Lad, was set to music by many 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.[37] In 1904, the cycleA Shropshire Lad was set byArthur Somervell, who in 1898 had begun to develop the concept of the Englishsong-cycle in his version ofTennyson's "Maud".[38]Stephen Banfield believes it was acquaintance with Somervell's cycle that led other composers to set Housman:Ralph Vaughan Williams is likely to have attended the first performance at theAeolian Hall on 3 February 1905.[39] His well-known cycle of six songsOn Wenlock Edge, forstring quartet,tenor and piano, was published in 1909. Between 1909 and 1911,George Butterworth produced settings in two collections,Six Songs from A Shropshire Lad andBredon Hill and Other Songs. He also wrote the orchestraltone poemA Shropshire Lad, first performed atLeeds Festival in 1912.[40]
Ivor Gurney was another composer who made renowned settings of Housman's poems. Towards the end ofWorld War I, he was working on his cycleLudlow and Teme, for voice and string quartet (published in 1919),[41] and went on to compose the eight-song cycleThe Western Playland in 1921.[42] One more who set Housman songs during this period wasJohn Ireland in the song cycle,The Land of Lost Content (1920–21).Charles Wilfred Orr produced 24 Housman settings in songs and song cycles composed from the 1920s into the 1950s.[43] Even composers not directly associated with the 'pastoral' tradition, such asArnold Bax,Lennox Berkeley andArthur Bliss, were attracted to Housman's poetry.
Housman's attitude to musical interpretations of his poetry, and indeed to music in general, was either indifference or torment. He told his friend Percy Withers that he knew nothing of music and it meant nothing to him. Withers once played him a record of the Vaughan Williams setting, but realised he had made a mistake when he saw the look of disgust on the poet's face.[44] Nevertheless, by 1976, a catalogue listed 400 musical settings of Housman's poems.[37] As of 2024, Lieder Net Archive records 678 settings of 188 texts.[45]
The earliest commemoration of Housman was in the chapel of Trinity College in Cambridge, where there is a memorial brass on the south wall.[46] The Latin inscription was composed by his colleague there,A. S. F. Gow, who was also the author of a biographical and bibliographical sketch published immediately following his death.[47] Translated into English, the memorial reads:
This inscription commemorates Alfred Edward Housman, who was for twenty-five years Kennedy Professor of Latin and Fellow of the College. Following inBentley's footsteps he corrected the transmitted text of the Latin poets with so keen an intelligence and so ample a stock of learning, and chastised the sloth of editors with such sharp mockery, that he takes his place as the virtual second founder of these studies. He was also a poet who, with a slender sheaf of verses, claimed for himself a secure place on our Helicon. He died on 30 April 1936 at the age of seventy-six.[48]
From 1947, University College London's academic common room was dedicated to his memory as the Housman Room.[49]Blue plaques followed later elsewhere, the first being on Byron Cottage in Highgate in 1969, recording the fact thatA Shropshire Lad was written there. More followed, placed on his Worcestershire birthplace, his homes and school in Bromsgrove.[50] The latter were encouraged by the Housman Society, which was founded in the town in 1973.[51] Another initiative was the statue in Bromsgrove High Street, showing the poet striding with walking stick in hand. The work of local sculptor Kenneth Potts, it was unveiled on 22 March 1985.[52]
The blue plaques in Worcestershire were set up on the centenary ofA Shropshire Lad in 1996. In September of the same year, a memorial window lozenge was dedicated atPoets' Corner inWestminster Abbey[53] The following year saw the première ofTom Stoppard's playThe Invention of Love, whose subject is the relationship between Housman and Moses Jackson.[54]
As the 150th anniversary of his birth approached,London University inaugurated its Housman lectures on classical subjects in 2005, initially given every second year then annually after 2011.[55] The anniversary itself in 2009 saw the publication of a new edition ofA Shropshire Lad, including pictures from across Shropshire taken by local photographer Gareth Thomas.[56] Among other events, there were performances of Vaughan Williams'sOn Wenlock Edge and Ivor Gurney'sLudlow and Teme at St Laurence's Church in Ludlow.[57]
These lectures are listed by date of delivery, with date of first publication given separately if different.
Selected Prose, edited by John Carter, Cambridge University Press, 1961
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| Preceded by | Kennedy Professor of LatinUniversity of Cambridge 1911–36 | Succeeded by |
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