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 Sort ascending Author name Excerpt
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Sheenagh Pugh
Her first collection demonstrates her consuming interest in other people, an eclectic range of individuals from history and the present, who are mostly finding life bleak or difficult. It demonstrates an equally wide range of...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Marghanita Laski
ML defines ecstasy as experiences that are joyful, transitory, unexpected, rare, valued, and extraordinary to the point of often seeming as if derived from a praeternatural source.
Laski, Marghanita. Ecstasy: A Study of Some Secular and Religious Experiences. Cresset Press.
5
An ecstatic state is one in which...
Textual Production Rosemary Sutcliff
RS titled from A. E. Housman and dedicated to her editor Kathleen Lines a memoir of her early years, Blue Remembered Hills.
TLS Centenary Archive Centenary Archive [1902-2012]. http://www.gale.com/c/the-times-literary-supplement-historical-archive.
4177 (22 April 1983): 396
Textual Production Mary Webb
MW wrote war poetry. The Lad Out There (whose title perhaps remembers Housman ) catches the tone of poems by women left behind and gives it a maternal flavour: So young he is, so dear...
Textual Production P. D. James
The title of this novel caused problems. James wanted to use this particular phrase, which occurred in four lines of verse she had copied from a journal article, but the source remained elusive. Valiant efforts...
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, 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
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.
502
a tradition represented here by poets from Housman , Hardy , and William Barnes
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...
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.
Warner, Sylvia Townsend. “Editorial Materials”. Sylvia Townsend Warner: Collected Poems, edited by Claire Harman, Carcanet New Press, pp. xi - xxiii; 275.
xv
He also suggested...
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.
vii-viii
Her diction is pure, he...
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 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 ...
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...

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.