Housman, A. E.
Housman, A. E. (1859–1936). Poet and classicist, whose failure at Oxford only delayed a career taking him to chairs of Latin at London and, in 1911, Cambridge. Labour expended on editions of Juvenal, Lucan, and Manilius made him the leading classical scholar of his generation and a formidable reviewer. His emotional life went into his poetry, A Shropshire Lad (1896) and Last Poems (1922). Shropshire, over the border from his native Worcestershire, became ‘the land of lost content’, where the beauty of nature is no defence against betrayal and death. He acknowledged affinities with Blake and Heine, and his relentless pessimism recalls Hardy, though expressed with more elegance and wit. His poems have inspired fine musical settings, and his stoic pastorals are some of the most sheerly beautiful in the late Romantic tradition. He is buried at Ludlow.
John Saunders
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Housman, A. E.