Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
A. E. Housman
-
Standard Name: Housman, A. E.
Used Form: Alfred Edward Housman
AEH
, who was also a classical scholar, editor, and critic, is best known for his poetry, mostly in ballad form. His first publication happened in 1896, and the last was posthumous. His characteristic subjects are personal loss, longing, and regret for lost youth and the past.
As a child Mary Meredith (later MW
) wrote stories for her younger brothers and sisters. She first had her writing published after the family moved to Stanton-on-Hine Heath, in the parish magazine.
Davies, Linda. Mary Webb Country. Palmers Press, 1990.
4
Intertextuality and Influence
Evelyn Waugh
Waugh presents himself as having been born into a world of beauty and preparing to die amid ugliness, an exile from the conditions of his childhood and youth.
One poem seems to echo A. E. Housman
as it commemorates the anniversary of losing a beloved who now lies cold and still in the earth. (It may have been the loss of her brother...
Intertextuality and Influence
Olivia Manning
The title comes from Housman
's Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries, who, heroic in the hour of others' collapse and despair and of their own deaths, saved the sum of things for pay...
Intertextuality and Influence
Edna St Vincent Millay
In the early years of her success, ESVM
credited as her influences Tennysonfor narrative power and technical innovations and Housman
for his emotional attitude and spare poignancy of expression.
qtd. in
Milford, Nancy. Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay. Random House, 2001.
174
Intertextuality and Influence
Anna Wickham
The eponymous house is a Shropshire farm belonging to Grandmother and Grandfather Hardy. Some allusion to Housman
's The Shropshire Lad is possible (though AW
had personal reasons for her choice, since her paternal grandparents...
Archer, William. Poets of the Younger Generation. John Lane, Bodley Head, 1902.
vii-viii
Her diction is pure, he...
Literary responses
Sylvia Townsend Warner
Louis Untermeyer
, an early supporter of STW
's poetry, commented favourably on her marked accent,half-modern, half-archaic blend of naivete and erudition, and the low-pitched but tart tone of voice.
qtd. in
Warner, Sylvia Townsend. “Editorial Materials”. Sylvia Townsend Warner: Collected Poems, edited by Claire Harman, Carcanet New Press, 1982, pp. xi - xxiii; 275.
Reviewer Andrew O'Hagan
, however, applies a withering pen to WC
in a tirade about a general style of anthology which is, he says, frivolous or aimed at the lifestyle or selfhelp markets. His complaint...
Reception
Lady Margaret Sackville
Dr Georgina Somerville
in The Harp Aeolian, 1953 (a tiny-format book, whose title suggests the poet as passive recipient of divine inspiration, and whose contents are not noted in the MLA Bibliography), offers...