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    A Shropshire Lad & Last Poems: “I do not choose the right word, I get rid of the wrong one.”
    A Shropshire Lad & Last Poems: “I do not choose the right word, I get rid of the wrong one.”
    A Shropshire Lad & Last Poems: “I do not choose the right word, I get rid of the wrong one.”
    Ebook99 pages41 minutes

    A Shropshire Lad & Last Poems: “I do not choose the right word, I get rid of the wrong one.”

    By A.E. Housman

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    Alfred Edward Housman was born on 26 March 1859 in a small village near Bromsgrove in Worcestershire, the eldest of seven children. His mother died when he was 12 and his father remarried. Despite a good formal education where he won prizes for his poetry and a scholarship to Oxford, Houseman failed to get his degree in Classics. Various reasons have been suggested for this; over confidence, a lack of interest in philosophy or the rejection by one of his roommates who was the love of his life but heterosexual. Housman himself documented his homosexuality and love of this roommate in a letter to the British Library that he specified be opened 25 years after it was sent. Housman independently pursued studying the Greek classicists in particular and published many scholarly articles on their work which were well regarded. This resulted in his taking a position as a Professor of Latin at University College London in 1892 and later at Trinity College Cambridge. Whilst his reputation as a classical scholar grew and remains relevant to this day, his poetry took longer to be recognised. His 63 poems forming the Shropshire Lad was self published as publishers rejected the work but although it sold slowly it chimed well with Victorian and Edwardian sensibilities and became a lasting success helped by striking a chord with musicians who were inspired by his words. Housman continued to write lyrical poetry that evokes the distinct imagery of the English countryside as well as powerfully questioning our mortality and although linked to the era his poetry is still widely quoted and remains relevant as this volume clearly demonstrates. A.E. Housman as he became known died on 30th April, 1936 aged 77 and his ashes are buried in Shropshire.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCopyright Group
    Release dateJan 3, 2014
    ISBN9781783949205
    A Shropshire Lad & Last Poems: “I do not choose the right word, I get rid of the wrong one.”

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      A Shropshire Lad & Last Poems - A.E. Housman

      A Shropshire Lad & Other Poems by A. E. Housman

      Alfred Edward Housman was born on 26 March 1859 in a small village near Bromsgrove in Worcestershire, the eldest of seven children.  His mother died when he was 12 and his father remarried.  Despite a good formal education where he won prizes for his poetry and a scholarship to Oxford,  Houseman failed to get his degree in Classics.  Various reasons have been suggested for this; over confidence, a lack of interest in philosophy or the rejection by one of his roommates who was the love of his life but heterosexual.  Housman himself documented his homosexuality and love of this roommate in a letter to the British Library that he specified be opened 25 years after it was sent.

      Housman independently pursued studying the Greek classicists in particular and published many scholarly articles on their work which were well regarded.  This resulted in his taking a position as a Professor of Latin at University College London in 1892 and later at Trinity College Cambridge.  Whilst his reputation as a classical scholar grew and remains relevant to this day,  his poetry took longer to be recognised.  His 63 poems forming the Shropshire Lad was self published as publishers rejected the work but although it sold slowly it chimed well with Victorian and Edwardian sensibilities and became a lasting success helped by striking a chord with musicians who were inspired by his words.

      Housman continued to write lyrical poetry that evokes the distinct imagery of the English countryside as well as powerfully questioning our mortality and although linked to the era his poetry is still widely quoted and remains relevant as this volume clearly demonstrates.  A.E. Housman as he became known died on 30th April, 1936 aged 77 and his ashes are buried in Shropshire.

      Index Of Contents

      Introduction by William Stanley Braithwaite

      A Shropshire Lad

      Epitaph On An Army of Mercenaries

      Could Man Be Drunk Forever

      Oh Who Is That Young Sinner

      Ho, Everyone That Thirsteth

      Here Dead We Lie

      If By Chance Your Eye Offend You

      The Stinging Nettle

      The Rainy Pleiads Wester

      Wake Not for the World-Heard Thunder

      Stars

      The Grizzly Bear

      The Laws of God, The Laws of Man

      Introduction by AE Housman to Last Poems

      Last Poems

      INTRODUCTION

      The method of the poems in A Shropshire Lad illustrates better than any theory how poetry may assume the attire of reality, and yet in speech of the simplest, become in spirit the sheer quality of

      loveliness. For, in these unobtrusive pages, there is nothing shunned which makes the spectacle of life parade its dark and painful, its ironic and cynical burdens, as well as those images with happy and exquisite aspects. With a broader and deeper background of experience and environment, which by some divine special privilege belongs to the poetic imagination, it is easier to set apart and contrast these opposing words and sympathies in a poet; but here we find them evoked in a restricted locale- an English county-where the rich, cool tranquil landscape gives a solid texture to the human show. What, I think, impresses one, thrills, like ecstatic, half-smothered strains of music, floating from unperceived instruments, in Mr. Housman's poems, is the encounter his spirit constantly endures with life. It is, this encounter, what you feel in the Greeks, and as in the Greeks, it is a spiritual waging of miraculous forces. There is, too, in Mr. Housman's poems, the singularly Grecian Quality of a clean and fragrant mental and emotional temper, vibrating equally whether the theme dealt with is ruin or defeat, or some great tragic crisis of spirit, or with moods and ardours of pure enjoyment and simplicities of feeling. Scarcely has any modern book of poems shown so sure a touch of genius in this respect: the magic, in a continuous glow saturating the substance of every picture and motive with its own peculiar essence.

      What has been called the cynical bitterness of Mr. Housman's poems, is really nothing more than his ability to etch in sharp tones the actualities of experience. The poet himself is never cynical; his joyousness is all too apparent in the very manner and intensity of expression. The lads of Ludlow are so human to him, the hawthorn and broom on the Severn shores are so fragrant with associations, he cannot help but compose under a kind of imaginative wizardry of exultation, even when the immediate subject is grim or grotesque. In many of these brief, tense poems the reader confronts a mask, as it were, with appalling and distorted lineaments; but behind it the poet smiles, perhaps sardonically, but smiles nevertheless. In the real countenance there are no tears or grievances, but a

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