A. E. Housman

He died in Cambridge at the age of 77.

He was born as the eldest son to Sarah Jane and Edward Housman in a hamlet in Worcestershire. He had six younger siblings. Two of his siblings also became writers.

His mother died of cancer on his 12th birthday, an incident that became a major source of his pessimism in life. His father later remarried.

He went to King Edward’s School for his primary education and later attended Bromsgrove School. He developed a strong interest in academic studies and poetry even as a high school student.

He won a scholarship to St John’s College, Oxford, to study classics. He immersed himself in textual analysis and was drawn to the works of Propertius which was not part of his curriculum. As a result, he ignored his curriculum and failed in the final examinations.

Housman got a job as a clerk in the Patent Office in London after leaving Oxford. He continued to pursue classical studies in Latin privately, and wrote scholarly articles for journals.

He had acquired such mastery of the language through self-study that in 1892, he was appointed as a professor of Latin at the University College London.

He published his first volume of poetry, ‘A Shropshire Lad’, which was a cycle of 63 poems, in 1896. The poems reflected Housman’s characteristic pessimism and obsession with death.

He had a profound interest in redaction, and found immense satisfaction in correcting scribal errors in classical texts. He published his critical edition of Manilius’s Astronomicon in five volumes from 1903 to 1930. Even though other poets have also published their editions, his edition is considered to be authoritative.

He translated and edited Juvenal’s ‘Satires’, a collection of satirical poems written by the Latin author in the 1st and 2nd centuries AD. Housman’s version was published in 1905.

His first volume of poetry, ‘A Shropshire Lad’, a collection of poems dealing with loss, loneliness and death, is the best known of all his works. The volume was published in 1896 and included poems like ‘To an Athlete Dying Young’, and ‘Loveliest of Trees, the Cherry Now.’ It became a bestseller.

He published a collection of the best of his previously unpublished poems in 1922 for his closest friend who was dying of cancer. It was the second and last of the poetry volumes he published in his lifetime.

He edited the ‘Astronomicon’, a poem written by Marcus Manilius, a Roman astrologer and poet in the 1st century A.D, and published his edition in five volumes starting from 1903 to 1930. Even though other poets have also published their editions, Housman’s edition is considered the most authoritative.