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
A. E. Housman quotes about
Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose, But young men think it is, and we were young.
But men at whiles are sober And think by fits and starts. And if they think, they fasten Their hands upon their hearts
Nature, not content with denying him the ability to think, has endowed him with the ability to write.
Poems very seldom consist of poetry and nothing else; and pleasure can be derived also from their other ingredients. I am convinced that most readers, when they think they are admiring poetry, are deceived by inability to analyse their sensations, and that they are really admiring, not the poetry of the passage before them, but something else in it, which they like better than poetry.
I think that to transfuse emotion - not to transmit thought but to set up in the reader's sense a vibration corresponding to what was felt by the writer - is the peculiar function of poetry.
To be a textual critic requires aptitude for thinking and willingness to think; and though it also requires other things, those things are supplements and cannot be substitutes. Knowledge is good, method is good, but one thing beyond all others is necessary; and that is to have a head, not a pumpkin, on your shoulders and brains, not pudding, in your head.
Think no more; 'tis only thinking / Lays lads underground.
Little is the luck I've had, And oh, 'tis comfort small - To think that many another lad - Has had no luck at all
Perfect understanding will sometimes almost extinguish pleasure.
Good religious poetry... is likely to be most justly appreciated and most discriminately relished by the undevout.
With rue my heart is laden For golden friends I had, For many a rose-lipped maiden And many a lightfoot lad.
And how am I to face the odds Of man's bedevilment and God's? I, a stranger and afraid In a world I never made.
White in the moon the long road lies, The moon stands blank above; White in the moon the long road lies That leads me from my love. Still hangs the hedge without a gust, Still, still the shadows stay: My feet upon the moonlit dust Pursue the ceaseless way. The world is round, so travellers tell, And straight through reach the track, Trudge on, trudge on, 'twill all be well, The way will guide one back. But ere the circle homeward hies Far, far must it remove: White in the moon the long road lies That leads me from my love.
Ten thousand times I've done my best and all's to do again.