A. E. Housman
A. E. Housman
Alfred Edward Housman, usually known as A. E. Housman, was an English classical scholar and poet, best known to the general public for his cycle of poems A Shropshire Lad. Lyrical and almost epigrammatic in form, the poems wistfully evoke the dooms and disappointments of youth in the English countryside. Their beauty, simplicity and distinctive imagery appealed strongly to late Victorian and Edwardian taste, and to many early 20th-century English composers both before and after the First World War. Through...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth26 March 1859
And silence sounds no worse than cheers / After death has stopped the ears.
I do not choose the right word, I get rid of the wrong one.
To justify God's ways to man.
Earth and high heaven are fixed of old and founded strong.
And malt does more than Milton can to justify God's ways to man.
Great literature should do some good to the reader: must quicken his perception though dull, and sharpen his discrimination though blunt, and mellow the rawness of his personal opinions.
You smile upon your friend to-day, To-day his ills are over; You hearken to the lover's say, And happy is the lover. 'Tis late to hearken, late to smile, But better late than never: I shall have lived a little while Before I die for ever.
Stone, steel, dominions pass, Faith too, no wonder; So leave alone the grass That I am under.
On occasions, after drinking a pint of beer at luncheon, there would be a flow into my mind with sudden and unaccountable emotion, sometimes a line or two of verse, sometimes a whole stanza, accompanied, not preceded by a vague notion of the poem which they were destined to form a part of.... I say bubble up because, so far as I could make out, the source of the suggestions thus proffered to the brain was the pit of the stomach.
The rainy Pleiads wester, / Orion plunges prone, / The stroke of midnight ceases, / And I lie down alone.
The laws of God, the laws of man he may keep that will and can; not I: let God and man decree laws for themselves and not for me.
Malt does more than Milton can to justify God's ways to man.