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Extract from 'A Shropshire Lad'"And brooding on my heavy ill, I met a statue standing still" Alfred E dward) Housman Alfred Edward Houseman (1859-1936), elder brother of the artist and playwright Laurence Houseman, was an outstanding Latin scholar (professor at Cambridge University from 1911 on), with a special affinity for ancient Roman poetry. As an original poet, his output was slender (A Shropshire Lad appeared in 1896, Last Poems in 1922 and More Poems in 1936), but A Shropshire Lad gained instant popularity and has retained a firm place in readers’ affections for its directness, elegant simplicity and deep feeling. Almost the entire volume was written in 1895, in a single creative outburst, while the poet was living in London. Shropshire was not Houseman's native county (which was Worcestershire), nor was he intimately familiar with it; the Shropshire of his book is a mindscape in which he subtly blends old ballad meters, classical reminiscences and intense emotional experiences "recollected in tranquillity." He won an open scholarship to St John's College, Oxford in 1877. At Oxford he developed a 'passionate attachment' to a fellow student, Moses Jackson with whom he shared rooms. A. E. Housman's realisation of his own homosexuality may have distracted him from his studies. He was also worried about his father's illness and bankruptcy. He was also stubbornly concentrating on his classical studies at the expense of his other subjects. The combination of circumstances may explain why he failed the finals of his degree in 1881. He obtained a pass degree the following year. He is said to have told Moses Jackson that he was the reason why he wrote poetry and was the subject of many poems. A. E. Housman worked for nine years as a civil servant in the London Patent Office where Moses Jackson was already working. A. E. Housman, Moses Jackson and his brother Adalbert shared lodgings in London. Adalbert Jackson may have also been gay and he and A. E. Housman may have had an affair. More Poems 41 and 42 were tributes to Adalbert Jackson after his sudden death from typhoid in 1892. While at the Patent Office A. E. Housman was writing scholarly articles in classical studies on such authors as Horace, Propertius, Ovid, A Eschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles. He made himself into a distinguished classical scholar by his private studies, and he was appointed to the Chair of Latin at University College, London in 1892, and then he became Professor of Latin at Trinity College, Cambridge in 1911. The emigration of Moses Jackson to India in 1897 and his subsequent marriage may have provided the emotional triggers that led to the nostalgic and melancholic moods in A. E. Housman's poems such as A Shropshire Lad. When Moses Jackson was dying in Canada A. E. Housman made an effort to complete his Last Poems so that Moses Jackson could have it. A. E. Housman's later poems are regarded as protests against the persecution of people like Oscar Wilde. A. E. Housman is reported to have sent an autographed copy of A Shropshire Lad to Oscar Wilde who was a friend of his brother Laurence Housman who was also gay. The two books that were published in A. E. Housman's lifetime would have given the knowing reader clues to his inclinations, but the volumes published posthumously by his brother Laurence were more candid. However, A. E. Housman's homosexuality did not become widely known publicly until 1967 when Laurence Housman published "A. E. Housman's 'De Amicita'," which is an essay written in about 1940 but deposited in the British Museum with a stipulation that it should not be published for twenty-five years.
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