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Concept
A. E. Housman
Summary
Alfred Edward Housman (ˈhaʊsmən; 26 March 1859 – 30 April 1936) was an English classical scholar and poet. After an initially poor performance while at university, he took employment as a clerk in London and established his academic reputation by publishing as a private scholar at first. Later Housman was appointed Professor of Latin at University College London and then at the University of Cambridge. He is now acknowledged as one of the foremost classicists of his age and has been ranked as one of the greatest scholars of any time. His editions of Juvenal, Manilius, and Lucan are still considered authoritative.
In 1896 he emerged as a poet with A Shropshire Lad, a cycle in which he poses as an unsophisticated and melancholy youth. After a slow start, this captured the imagination of young readers, its preoccupation with early death appealing to them especially during times of war. In 1922 his Last Poems added to his reputation, which was further enhanced by the large number of song settings drawn from these collections. Following his death, further poems from his notebooks were published by his brother, Laurence. It was then too, though Housman had made no admission himself, that his sexual orientation began to be questioned.
The eldest of seven children, Housman was born at Valley House in Fockbury, a hamlet on the outskirts of Bromsgrove in Worcestershire, to Sarah Jane (née Williams, married 17 June 1858 in Woodchester, Gloucester) and Edward Housman (whose family came from Lancaster), and was baptised on 24 April 1859 at Christ Church, in Catshill. His mother died on his twelfth birthday, and his father, a country solicitor, then married an elder cousin, Lucy, in 1873. Two of his siblings became prominent writers, sister Clemence Housman and brother Laurence Housman.
Housman was educated at King Edward's School in Birmingham and later Bromsgrove School, where he revealed his academic promise and won prizes for his poems. In 1877 he won an open scholarship to St John's College, Oxford, and went there to study classics.
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