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. 

An example of his philosophy can be seen in his story, "The
Child of Lancashire," published in 1893 in The London
Gazette. It 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, but is attacked by the same
gang (who don't recognize him) and is thrown off London
Bridge into the Thames, which is unfortunately frozen over,
and is killed on the hard ice below. 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. Death is a really important stage
of life to Housman; without death, Housman would probably
not have been able to be a poet. (Housman, himself, died in
1937.) A few of his poems show an uncharacteristic optimism
and love of beauty, however. 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. Unsurprisingly,
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
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. I can forgive his sexual
orientation, especially since my own father and brother
share it (and sometimes I wonder about myself!) His
wonderful poetry and other writings stand apart, by
themselves, in their unique and special splendor.