A. E. Housman
(1859–1936)

A leading classical scholar of his age, Alfred Edward Housman devoted his life to teaching and translating the great Latin poets. Yet, most modern readers who know Housman know him as the author of three slender volumes of poetry that are as romantic and melancholy as any ever written.

Housman was born in Worcestershire, the oldest of seven children in a middle-class family. His carefree childhood came to an end when his mother died, following a long illness, on his twelfth birthday. Money became a problem for the family, but Housman, a bright and resourceful young man, won a scholarship to Oxford, where he studied classical literature and philosophy. Though he was a brilliant student, his intolerance of any error by himself or others left him with few friends.

While at Oxford, Housman fell secretly in love with a young woman who was interested only in his friendship. His despair over this relationship combined with his unhappy teen years seems to have darkened the rest of Housman's life and gave his poetry its bitter undertones.

Upon leaving Oxford, Housman went to work in the Patent Office. Determined to prove himself in the classics, he studied Greek and Latin at night and wrote scholarly articles for academic journals. In 1892, his hard-earned reputation as an expert in his field led to his appointment as professor of Latin at University College in London.

Though Housman spent the balance of his life engaged in scholarly pursuits, he found time to write poetry. His first and most famous collection of verse, A Shropshire Lad (1896), has as its fictitious narrator a homesick farmboy living in the city. In simple, precise language and brisk, regular rhythms, Housman focuses on the grim realities and fleeting joys of life. Housman paid for the first publication of A Shropshire Lad out of his own pocket, but it soon became highly popular. More than twenty-five years later, Last Poems (1922) was an instant best seller. After Housman's death, his brother Laurence edited and published More Poems (1936).

In a famous lecture that he delivered in 1933, Housman, who worked at projecting a public image as an emotionless intellectual, stated that the goal of poetry is to "transfuse emotion," not to transmit thought. A well-written poem, he maintained, makes a physical impact on the reader, like a shiver down the spine or a punch in the stomach. It is because of his impact in much of his own work that the best of A. E. Housman's poems have been marked for immortality.

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