1859-1936
Alfred Edward Housman, classical scholar and poet; was born at Valley House, Fockbury near Bromsgrove in Worcestershire. His father was a solicitor and one of his younger brothers was the novelist and dramatist Laurence Housman. Alfred was educated at King Edward's School, Bromsgrove and St. John's College, Oxford where, to his shame and humiliation, he failed his final examinations. From 1882 to 1892 he worked at the Patent Office in London and, in his spare time, devoted himself to classical studies and to thereby establish himself as a scholar to regain his pride. lie was also writing some poetry during this period but it was his brilliant articles on the classics in scholarly journals which gained him a high reputation and led to his appointment as Professor of Latin at University College, London in 1892. He remained there until 1911 and became a respected and renowned scholar. An apparently rather dry and austere man (at least to those who did not know him well), he astounded his students and colleagues by the publication of his first collection of poems A Shropshire Lad (1896), astounded them because of the contrast between the romanticism of the poems and the outward severity of the man they knew as their Professor of Latin.
A Shropshire Lad is a cycle of poems which tells of the central character, Terence Hearsay, who goes to live in London, in exile as it were from his native county. They are very personal very nostalgic poems with many of Housman's own feelings and emotions contained within them. Of course they are about Shropshire itself, not perhaps the intimately known Shropshire of Mary Webb but, rather, Housman's idealised conception of the county and country life, lie uses place-names especially to evoke rusticity, to conjure up nostalgia - it is an idealised view of Shropshire although not without an awareness of some of the harsher realities of life. One of the great ironies about this work, for A Shropshire Lad is arguably the county's best known literary testament, is that a number of poems were written before Housman had actually set foot in Shropshire - hence some topographical anomalies. In fact, as a boy he had first seen the distant hills of Shropshire, those ".... . blue remembered hills", from the summit of Worm's Ash Lane near his Fockbury home. It was the memory of this when he himself was in near exile in London which helped to inspire his romantic evocation of Shropshire.
When his poems became well known Housman was surprised to find people making literary pilgrimages to see the places he had immortalised. Only then did they discover just how many of the aforementioned topographical anomalies there were. He had visited the county during the period when he was writing the poems, or at least some of them, and used places, scenes and place-names which he had come across. What the literary pilgrims had not bargained for was the fact that he used a fair degree of licence to move places around or to describe one place under another's name if it suited his purpose. So, for example, that well known vane on Hughley steeple in his poem is, in actuality, hard to discover because he had another church in mind - Hughley has no steeple. But of course none of this matters since Housman's poetry does not depend on accurate description of this kind but rather on that marvellous ability to recreate a sense of country life which has passed, if it ever truly existed that is.
In 1911
Housman became Kennedy Professor of Latin at Cambridge where his
reputation as a classical scholar continued to grow. He wrote
further Shropshire poems which were published in his Last Poems
(1922). Housman died at Cambridge but his ashes were brought to
Shropshire and buried near the north door of St. Laurence's
Church in Ludlow beneath a tablet
bearing some of his own lines:
Goodnight; ensured release,
Imperishable peace,
Have these for yours.
From An Illustrated Literary Guide to Shropshire by Gordon Dickins, published by Shropshire Libraries, 1987. © Gordon Dickins, 1987.
The following works are available in the West Midlands Creative Literature Collection:-
Collected poems
Collected poems and selected prose
Introductory lecture
Last poems
Letters of A.E. Housman
More poems
Selected prose
A Shropshire Lad
The complete text of A Shropshire Lad can be found on the site of Project Bartleby at Columbia University. Selected poetry is also available in Representative poetry on-line, part of the University of Toronto site.
The following works are available in the West Midlands Creative Literature Collection:-
Alfred Edward Housman; recollections
A.E Housman: the scholar poet by Richard Perceval
Graves
Letters of A.E. Housman
Alfred Edward Housman's 'De amicitia' by Laurence
Housman
Poetic art of A E Housman: theory and practice by B.J.
Leggett
A.E. Housman by Norman Page
The land of lost content (1995) by Jane Allsopp relates Housman's life and poetry to the Shropshire countryside.
A short walk along Wenlock Edge is described on this website, which is evocative of the scenery that Housman portrayed so well.
Page created 9 February 2001 and last updated
28 October 2002
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