ALFRED EDWARD HOUSMAN

[1859-1936]

A pessimism darker than Omar-FitzGerald's and even more intense than Hardy's was voiced by a cloistered scholar, a professor of Latin, who wrote blithely about murder and suicide, personal betrayal and cosmic injustice. Alfred Edward Housman was born in Fockbury, Worcestershire (close to the Shropshire border), the country which became the scene of his poetry. After attending school at the nearby town of Bromsgrove he proceeded to St. John's College, Oxford where he studied classics and philosophy and in 1881 shocked his friends and teachers by failing his final examinations (he was at the time in a state of psychological turmoil resulting from his suppressed homosexual love for a fellow student). He was forced to accept the work of a civil servant in the Patent Office. He worked ten years in this uncongenial position; while he pursued his classical studies alone, gradually building up a reputation as a great textual critic of Latin literature by his contributions to learned periodicals. In 1892 he was appointed to the Chair of Lain at University College, London, and from 1911 until his death he was professor of Latin at Cambridge.

    It was characteristic of Housman that his classical studies consisted of meticulous, impersonal textual investigations; there was something reserved and solitary about his life as there was about his scholarship, in which he allowed no trace of his feeling for literature to appear. That feeling nevertheless ran strong and deep, and in his lecture The Name and Nature of Poetry (1933) he expressed the view that poetry cannot be explained or analyzed, but is recognized by its almost physical effects on the reader as he reads. In a respect, Housman's inverted "passion for distinction" made him disguise his work as well as himself. He originally intended to call A Shropshire Lad, his first and most famous book, Poems by Terence Hearsay. After A Shropshire Lad became popular, Housman was surprised when critics referred to his poetry as having a "classical" origin. He insisted that, although he may have been unconsciously influenced by the Greeks and Latins, the chief sources of the book were Scottish Border ballads, Shakespeare's songs, and Heine's lyrics. The combination is apparent in everything Housman published, even in the posthumous work. It explains Housman's deceptive simplicity and sparsely decorated verse, a verse whose sweetness is strengthened by its severity.

    Housman's writings on classical subjects consisted of articles and reviews marked by bitterly sarcastic exposure of the work of inferior editors punctuated by gloomy remarks about life. He was a very great textual critic of Latin poetry, but his remarks on the folly and incompetence of other textual critics go far beyond anything normally expected of superior scholarship talking of inferior. "If a man will comprehend the richness and variety of the universe, and inspire his mind with a due measure of wonder and of awe, he must contemplate the human intellect not only on its heights of genius but in its abysses of ineptitude." Housman's aim as a poet was not to expand or develop the resources of English poetry but by limitation and concentration to achieve an utterance both compact and moving. He was influenced by Greek and Latin lyric poetry, by the traditional ballad, and by the lyrics of the early 19th-century German poet Heinrich Heine. His favorite theme is that of the doomed youth acting out the tragedy of his brief life in a context of agricultural activity and against a specific English background containing visual reminders of man's long history there. Nature is beautiful but indifferent and is to be enjoyed while we are still able to enjoy it. Love, friendship, and conviviality¹⁾ cannot last and may well result in betrayal or death, but are likewise to be relished while there is time. The wryly ironic tone sometimes degenerates into melodrama, and the stoicism seems at time histrionic,²⁾ but at his best Housman's control of cadence enabled him to sound the note of resigned wisdom with quiet poignancy. Housman avoids self-pity by projecting the emotion through an imagined character, notably the "Shropshire Lad," so that even the first-person poems seem to be distanced in some degree. At the same time the poems are distinguished sharply from the "gather ye rosebuds" tradition by the undertones of fatalism and even of doom.

1. conviviality: fondness for feasts; pleasure; mirth.

2. histrionic: artificial; not natural; of actors or acting.