A E Housman, in full Alfred Edward Housman (1859 - 1936), was a brilliant Classics Scholar and poet whose lyrics, besides their exquisite simplicity, carried, in a manner replete with irony and paradox, the complex emotional responses of man to a world of transience, where the only certitude is that one which is least desired—the certitude of death.

Alfred Edward Housman was born in Fockbury, Worcestershire, England, the eldest of seven children of a Bromsgrove solicitor. He attended Bromsgrove School as a dayboy, but soon after he started there his mother fell ill and his father sank into helpless despondency; Housman was very close to his mother and spent many hours with her in her final illness. As the school holidays approached it was decided that he should go away for a while to visit family friends; he was with them when he heard the news of his mother’s death. He later said that this bereavement at the age of twelve, which shadowed his whole life, cost him his belief in any kind of religious faith. He remained an atheist all his life.

Housman won a scholarship to St John's College, Oxford in 1877 where he received first class honours in classical moderations. Housman was known to be arrogant, already sure what his life's work was to be: redaction — the search for truth through correcting scribal errors in classical texts. However, he became distracted when he fell in love with his roommate Moses Jackson. Housman was gay. Moses Jackson was not; he was up in Oxford on a science scholarship. Homosexuality he called 'beastliness' or 'spooniness'. And that for Housman meant a lifetime of unfulfilled loneliness.

Housman failed his final exams, but fortunately managed to pass the final year. For the next eleven years he was a clerk in the Patent Office, at first because Moses Jackson also worked there. They shared lodgings till Jackson sailed to India to become the headmaster of a school (he also taught science and even designed the lab furniture). Eighteen months later he came home to marry, but Housman was not asked to the wedding. They rarely met again. And then never after Jackson retired to British Columbia where he died of cancer in 1922.

Meanwhile, Housman had been making a name for himself in the small world of textual criticism through spare time study in the British Museum. In 1892, on the strength of this scholarship, he was offered the Chair of Latin at University College, London (UCL). As a classicist, Housman gained renown for his editions of the Roman poets Juvenal, Lucan, and Manilius, as well as his meticulous and intelligent commentaries and his disdain for the unscholarly.

Housman only published two volumes of poetry during his life: A Shropshire Lad (1896) and Last Poems (1922). The majority of the poems in A Shropshire Lad centre around themes of pastoral beauty, unrequited love, fleeting youth, grief, death, and the patriotism of the common soldier. After the manuscript had been turned down by several publishers, Housman decided to publish it at his own expense, much to the surprise of his colleagues and students.

While A Shropshire Lad was slow to gain in popularity, the advent of war, first in the Boer War and then in World War I, gave the book widespread appeal due to its nostalgic depiction of brave English soldiers. Several composers created musical settings for Housman's work, deepening his popularity.

Housman continued to focus on his teaching, but in the early 1920s, when his old friend Moses Jackson was dying, Housman chose to assemble his best unpublished poems so that Jackson might read them. These later poems, most of them written before 1910, exhibit a range of subject and form much greater than the talents displayed in A Shropshire Lad. When Last Poems was published in 1922, it was an immediate success. A third volume, More Poems, was released posthumously in 1936 by his brother, Laurence, as was an edition of Housman's Complete Poems (1939).
Despite acclaim as a scholar and a poet in his lifetime, Housman lived as a recluse, rejecting honours and avoiding the public eye. He died on April 30, 1936, in Cambridge.

Music Credits: Frolic - E's Jammy Jams

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