A. E. Housman (1859–1936) was an English classical scholar and poet. His collection A Shropshire Lad (1896), short lyrics about youth, love and early death in an idealised English countryside, became one of the best-loved books of English poetry.
A failed examination
Alfred Edward Housman was born on 26 March 1859 near Bromsgrove, in Worcestershire, the eldest of seven children; his mother died on his twelfth birthday. He won a scholarship to St John's College, Oxford, where he studied classics.
To general surprise, he failed his final examinations in 1881, perhaps because of personal turmoil linked to his love for a fellow student, Moses Jackson.
The scholar
Housman worked for ten years as a clerk in the Patent Office in London, publishing articles on Latin texts in his spare time. Their brilliance won him the chair of Latin at University College London in 1892.
In 1911 he became Kennedy Professor of Latin at Cambridge. His edition of the Roman poet Manilius, on which he worked for thirty years, and his ferocious reviews of other scholars made him famous among classicists.
The poet
A Shropshire Lad was published at his own expense in 1896. Sales were slow at first, then grew during the Boer War and the First World War, when soldiers carried it in their pockets.
Last Poems followed in 1922, and More Poems was published by his brother after his death in Cambridge on 30 April 1936. Composers such as George Butterworth and Ralph Vaughan Williams set his poems to music.
Anecdotes
Poems that come in the bath
In a lecture of 1933, The Name and Nature of Poetry, Housman said that he could tell a true poem because it made the hairs of his chin bristle while he was shaving.
A county he hardly knew
Shropshire was for Housman a distant landscape seen from the hills of his Worcestershire childhood. He admitted that he had not visited many of the places named in his poems.
Frequently asked questions
What is A Shropshire Lad?
A collection of sixty-three short poems, published in 1896, about young men in a rural English county facing love, war and death.
Was Housman a professor?
Yes, he was professor of Latin at University College London and then at Cambridge, one of the greatest classical scholars of his time.
Who set Housman's poems to music?
George Butterworth, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Ivor Gurney and many other English composers.