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
I could no more define poetry than a terrier can define a rat.
If a line of poetry strays into my memory, my skin bristles so that the razor ceases to act.
Good religious poetry... is likely to be most justly appreciated and most discriminately relished by the undevout.
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.
Poetry is not the thing said, but the way of saying it.
Even when poetry has a meaning, as it usually has, it may be inadvisable to draw it out . . .. Perfect understanding will sometimes almost extinguish pleasure.
His folly has not fellow Beneath the blue of day That gives to man or woman His heart and soul away.
May will be fine next year as like as not: / Oh ay, but then we shall be twenty-four.
No change, though you lie under / The land you used to plough.
Pass me the can, lad; there's an end of May.
O Queen of air and darkness,I think 'tis truth you say,And I shall die to-morrow;But you will die to-day.
Little is the luck I've had, And oh, 'tis comfort small - To think that many another lad - Has had no luck at all
From far, from eve and morning And yon twelve-winded sky, The stuff of life to knit me Blew hither: here am I
Here of a Sunday morning / My love and I would lie, / And see the coloured counties, / And hear the larks so high / About us in the sky.