The Poetry Style of A.E. Housman
Comments by J. Zimmerman

Books by A.E. Housman:
* A Shropshire Lad (first published in 1896).

A Shropshire Lad

Poems of love, longing, and loss, primarily for young men in rural Britain at the start of the 20th century.

Time Line

1859
Born 26 March 1859 in Worcestershire.

1877
Won scholarship to St. John's College, Oxford, where he studied classics and roomed with Moses Jackson and A. W. Pollard.

1879
Immersed in and successful at textual analysis, Housman neglected ancient history and philosophy, thereby failing his final exams and having to leave college with no degree. Housman continued his classical studies independently and published his scholarly articles (on the work of Aeschylus, Euripides, Horace, Ovid, Propertius, and Sophocles).

1892
Accepted offer from University College London of a professorship of Latin.

1896
Self-published (after several publishers rejected his MS) his A Shropshire Lad, 63 poems on love and death of young rural men.

1905
Edited the work of Juvenal.

1909
Ralph Vaughan Williams' On Wenlock Edge composed for tenor, string quartet, and piano: a cycle of songs using six poems from A Shropshire Lad.

1911
Accepted offer from Trinity College, Cambridge, of the Kennedy Professorship of Latin.

1922
Published Last Poems.

1926
Edited the work of Lucan.

1933
Lectured on his poetry for the first time: in "The Name and Nature of Poetry" his thesis was that poetry should appeal to emotions rather intellect.

1936
Died 30 April 1936. Ashes buried in Ludlow, Shropshire.

1936
Posthumous publication of More Poems.

1939
Posthumous publication of Collected Poems.

1976
A catalogue lists 400 musical settings of Housman's poems [wikipedia].

1997
Tom Stoppard's play The Invention of Love centers on the youthful and the aged Housman, these two being the main characters; it helps if one already knows something of Housman's life and his (rejected) love for his Oxford room-mate, Moses Jackson.


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