This article is an updated version of
the one first published at The Master’s Artist.
A.E. Housman (1859-1936)
achieved poetic fame in 1896 with the publication of 63 poems in a volume
entitled A
Shropshire Lad. His next volume of poetry, Last
Poems, was published in 1922. Two additional posthumous collections
were published by his brother Laurence.
His
career didn’t start on an auspicious note. He failed to graduate with honors
from Oxford, which denied an immediate academic career. And so he trained for
the Civil Service, passing the examination and becoming a minor clerk in the
U.K. Patent office from 1882 to 1892.
But
during these years he maintained his love for classical scholarship. He
continued his studies in his spare time and published articles in scholarly
journals. In 1892 he became a professor of Latin at University College, London;
in 1911 he joined the faculty at Cambridge.
His
poetic output, while comparatively small, has an enormous impact, influencing
two generations of poets and critics on both sides of the Atlantic, including
Thomas Hardy, W.H. Auden, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Wilfred Owen, T.S. Eliot,
Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks, among others. On the fictional influence
side, Housman was the favorite poet of Inspector Morse in the BBC mystery
series.
By
the time I was in high school, Housman was enshrined in the literary canon,
firmly placed in the Late Victorian/Edwardian section of textbooks and anthologies.
It was in such a high school textbook that I first met his poetry, with a poem
taken from A Shropshire Lad:
To an Athlete Dying Young
The
time you won your town the race
We
chaired you through the market-place;
Man
and boy stood cheering by,
And
home we brought you shoulder-high.
To-day,
the road all runners come,
Shoulder-high
we bring you home,
And
set you at your threshold down,
Townsman
of a stiller town.
Smart
lad, to slip betimes away
From
fields where glory does not stay
And
early though the laurel grows
It
withers quicker than the rose.
Eyes
the shady night has shut
Cannot
see the record cut.
And
silence sounds no worse than cheers
After
earth has stopped the ears:
Now
you will not swell the rout
Of
lads that wore their honours out,
Runners
whom renown outran
And
the name died before the man.
So
set, before its echoes fade,
The
Fleet foot on the sill of shade,
And
hold to the low lintel up
The
still-defended challenge-cup.
And
round that early-laurelled head
Will
flock to gaze the strengthless dead,
And
find unwithered on its curls
The
garland briefer than a girl’s.
Many
of Housman’s poems reflect the influence or inspiration of Scottish ballads,
songs and even aphorisms. He wrote about love, both requited and unrequited;
soldiers (one can see the echoes of Housman in the World War I poets like Owen
and Rupert Brooke; homesickness; and his love of Shropshire.
And
he wrote about memory and death.
His
poems are carefully cut and chiseled, honed and polished like fine jewels. They
are full of what we might call “poetic lines,” memorable words and phrases and
ideas that reflect the beauty of the language and a rather intense emotion in
the poet.
Poem
54 (from A Shropshire Lad)
With
rue my heart is laden
For golden friends I had,
For
many a rose-lipt maiden
And many a lightfoot lad.
By
brooks too broad for leaping
The lightfoot boys are laid;
The
rose-lipt girls are sleeping
In fields where roses fade.
Photograph: A view of the Shropshire countryside.
Today
we associate the poetry of World War I with a relatively small number of poets,
some 10 to 15, who fought and wrote poems. Many of them, like Wilfred Owen,
Rupert Brooke, Edward Thomas and Isaac Rosenberg, died in the conflict. Others,
like Robert Graves and Siegfried Sassoon, survived and eventually died of old
age.
