The Poetry Of A. E. Housman
 
Housman was born in Burton-On-Trent, England, in 1865, just
as the US Civil War was ending. As a young child, he was
disturbed by the news of slaughter from the former British
colonies, and was affected deeply. This turned him into a
brooding, introverted teenager and a misanthropic,
pessimistic adult. This outlook on life shows clearly in
his poetry. Housman believed that people were generally
evil, and that life conspired against mankind. This is
evident not only in his poetry, but also in his short
stories. 

His story, "The Child of Lancashire," published in 1893 in
The London Gazette, is about an child who travels to
London, where his parents die, and he becomes a street
urchin. There are veiled implications that the child is a
homosexual (as was Housman, most probably), and he becomes
mixed up with a gang of similar youths, attacking affluent
pedestrians and stealing their watches and gold coins.
Eventually he leaves the gang and becomes wealthy. In turn,
he is attacked by the same gang (who don't recognize him)
and killed. 

Housman's poetry is similarly pessimistic. In fully half
the poems the speaker is dead. In others, he is about to
die or wants to die, or his girlfriend is dead. Even though
death is a really important setting for Housman, a few of
his poems, show an uncharacteristic optimism and love of
beauty. For example, in his poem "Trees," he begins:
 
Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
 Hung low with bloom along the bow
 Stands about the woodland side
 A virgin in white for Eastertide 

and ends:
 
Poems are made by fools like me
 But only God can make a tree.
 
(This is a popular quotation, yet most people don't know
its source!)
 
Religion is another theme of Housman's. Housman seems to
have had trouble reconciling conventional Christianity with
his homosexuality and his deep clinical depression. In
"Apologia pro Poemate Meo" he states:
 
In heaven-high musings and many
 Far off in the wayward night sky,
 I would think that the love I bear you
 Would make you unable to die [death again]
 Would God in his church in heaven
 Forgive us our sins of the day,
 That boy and man together
 Might join in the night and the way.
 
I think that the sense of hopelessness and homosexual
longing is unmistakable. However, these themes went
entirely over the heads of the people of Housman's day, in
the early 1900s.
 
The best known collection of Housman's poetry is A
Shropshire Lad, published in 1925, followed shortly by More
Poems, 1927, and Even More Poems, 1928. Most collections
have the same sense and style. They could easily be one
collection, in terms of stylistic content. All show a sense
of the fragility of life, the perversity of existence, and
a thinly veiled homosexual longing, in spite of the fact
that many of the poems apparently (but subliminally?) speak
of young women. It is clear from these works that women
were only a metaphor for love, which in Housman's case
usually did not include the female half of society. More
Poems contains perhaps the best statement of Housman's
philosophy of life, a long, untitled poem (no. LXIX) with
oblique references to the town of his birth,
Burton-on-Trent, and statements like:
 
And while the sun and moon endure
 Luck's a chance, but trouble's sure...
 
Indeed, how much more pessimistic can one be?
 
Not only a poet and storyteller, Housman was a noted
classical scholar. He is known for his extensive
translations of the Greek classics, especially Greek plays
by Euripides and Sophocles. Unfortunately, the bulk of his
manuscripts were lost in a disastrous fire in his office at
Oxford, which was caused by a lit cigar falling into a
 
There were rumors that Housman was hidden in a closet with
a young boy at the time, and therefore did not see the fire
in his own office until it was too late to extinguish it.
The Trustees of the college, however, managed to squelch
the rumors, and Housman's academic tenure was not
threatened by the incident.
 
Now only a few gems of his poetic translation remain. One
of the finest is from Sophocles' Alcestis, which begins:
 
Of strong things I find not any
 That is as the strength of Fate...
 
Indeed, a comment on Housman's sense of fatalism.
 
Housman is considered a minor poet, primarily because of
his use of rhyme and meter, and frequent and effective use
of imagery and symbolism. (It is generally accepted that
major twentieth-century poetry must inevitably go beyond
the strictures of late-nineteenth century styles, so any
poet using such styles can only be classed as minor.)
Nonetheless, I like him. His wonderful poetry and other
writings stand apart, by themselves, in their unique and
special splendor.