“A Brief Bio of A.E. Houseman,” by Andrew J. Schatkin

“A Brief Bio of A.E. Houseman,” by Andrew J. Schatkin

My dear friends thinkers and readers and all you lovers of literature whoever you are and wherever you may be found my dear colleagues of all thought streams and opinions, I bid and ask you to join with me in this voyage of intellectual discovery where those who may wish to engage in critical thinking and decline to engage in and accept media lies and falsehoods and media political code words and hype can join in the effort to gain truth and facts amid the barrage of corruption and virtual darkness we are confronted with and befuddled and made effective fools of. I welcome you in this quest and task of attaining and coming to know intellectual honesty and honest discernment. Join with me in this voyage of discovery to get and find what is valid and authentic in this world of confusion and to come with me in tearing apart the curtain of lies and darkness that hides from us what is truth and facts.

My dear fellow lovers of great literature and the great prose and poets of our English tradition once again I seek or rather attempt to present a bio sketch of one of the greatest of English lyric poets at least in my opinion and estimation A.E. Housman. He and others I have written about are always beside me to uplift me and inspire me and raise my thoughts, spirit and consciousness beyond the everyday and mundane. I now do the same for the very great English lyric poet, A.E. Housman.

Alfred Edward Housman was born in 1859 and died in 1936 and was an English classical scholar and poet best known to the general public for his poems A Shropshire Lad, lyrics that evoke the dooms and disappointments of youth in the English countryside. They are most beautiful and in their imagery and simplicity appealed to the Edwardian age of the early 20th century. These poems were in a sense songs. Housman was, however, one of the foremost classicists of the age and was a great scholar and on the strength and quality of his private scholarly work and was appointed professor of Latin in university college in London and then at Cambridge and did authoritative editions of Latin poets Juvenal, Manlius, and Lucan, which are still regarded as authoritative.

He was born in a small hamlet on the outskirts of Bromsgrove and was educated at King Edward’s school in Birmingham and later at the Bromsgrove School where he won prizes for his poems and then won an open scholarship to St. John's College at Oxford. In 1877, Housman failed his finals due to his neglect of ancient history and philosophy. After Oxford, he worked as a clerk in the patent office in London.

Housman pursued his classical studies independently and published regularly scholarly articles and in 1892 his reputation gained him the professorship of Latin at university college in London. Housman's early work included both Latin and Greek. He began to specialize in Latin poetry and in 1911 was appointed to the Kennedy professorship of Latin at Trinity College in Cambridge, and between 1903 and 1930 published his critical edition of Manilius' Astronomica in five volumes and also edited works by Juvenal and Lucan. Housman attacked shoddy scholarship and intimidated students, in particular female students. He made frequent visits to France. He did not speak of his poems until he gave a lecture entitled “The Name and Nature of Poetry,” arguing poetry should appeal to the mot emotions.

While in London, Houseman in his later years here completed “A Shropshire Lad,” a cycle of 63 poems, and rapidly became a lasting success the poems are marked by a preoccupation with death without religious consolation. After the first world war, Housman began collecting a new set of poems. He published a new collection of a group of poem entitled “Last Poems” in 1922 and after his death in 1936 his brother Laurence published more poems. In 1936, much of Housman's poetry was set to music and there were a number of commemorations.

This ends this sketch of the life and work of a great classical scholar and lyric poets. Sad to say, there are many in today's world and society that know nothing of classical scholarship, the classical writers Houseman edited, or even of poetry. I do say not to know of these classical writers such as Juvenal and Lucan is to have and endure a loss. The classics are and always will be the foundation of our culture and to not at least know of them is live a kind of darkness and dark age. We stand on the shoulders of the classics.

I also know this much that Housman's poetry is most sensitive and evocative. I read his poems while in high school and college and never will forget them. Like the Psalms, they are fixed in my memory. To read Housman is to enter a new and entrancing world of beauty. And so I say, my dear children and parents and grandchildren and grandparents, introduce this poet to the new and growing generation and do not any generation miss out on an of these lyrics that have since their publication entranced and fascinated all those who have read and heard their music.

Note: I am indebted to Wikipedia for much of the information in this essay.