A. E. Housman

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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.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Intertextuality and Influence Flora Thompson
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...
Intertextuality and Influence Mary Webb
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.
TLS Centenary Archive Centenary Archive [1902-2012]. http://www.gale.com/c/the-times-literary-supplement-historical-archive.
(10 September 1964): 836
Having described his...
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.
xv
He also suggested...
Literary responses Margaret Kennedy
The novel's initial favourable reviews came from an earlier generation of authors, including George Moore , A. E. Housman , Thomas Hardy , Arnold Bennett , J. M. Barrie , and H. G. Wells ...
Literary responses Wendy Cope
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...
Literary responses Rosamund Marriott Watson
William Archer included RMW alongside A. E. Housman , Rudyard Kipling , Alice Meynell , E. Nesbit , and William Butler Yeats in Poets of the Younger Generation (1902).
Archer, William. Poets of the Younger Generation. John Lane, Bodley Head, 1902.
vii-viii
Her diction is pure, he...
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...
Reception Margery Lawrence
In his Foreword to the volume, Sir Shane Leslie finds the influences of Shelley , Yeats , Tennyson , Kipling , Housman , Chesterton , and Fiona MacLeod (pen-name of William Sharp). Yet according to...
Textual Features Philip Larkin
The central subject is the period which saw the rise of modernism and its assimilation—or not—into the native English tradition,
Motion, Andrew. Philip Larkin: A Writer’s Life. Faber and Faber, 1993.
502
a tradition represented here by poets from Housman , Hardy , and William Barnes
Textual Features Willa Cather
A. S. Byatt finds in this volume a mournful Arcadian tone, thinly ecstatic, and owing much to Swinburne and Housman .
Byatt, A. S., and Willa Cather. “Introduction”. A Lost Lady, Virago, 2000, p. v - xiv.
v
Textual Features Carol Ann Duffy
Many poems here feature women answering back to canonical male voices: Liz Lochhead to Donne , Jenny Joseph to W. S. Gilbert , U. A. Fanthorpe to Walt Whitman , Wendy Cope to A. E. Housman

Timeline

No timeline events available.

Texts

Housman, A. E. A Shropshire Lad. Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1896.
Housman, A. E. “Editorial Materials”. The Letters of A. E. Housman, edited by Henry Maas, Rupert Hart-Davis, 1971, p. various pages.
Housman, A. E. Last Poems. Grant Richards, 1922.
Housman, A. E. More Poems. Jonathan Cape, 1936.
Housman, A. E. The Name and Nature of Poetry. Macmillan, 1933.