Unrequited love and youthful death are the author's recurrent themes. Always forthright and devoid of the esoteric and modernistic qualities of more revered poets, Housman's work, though imbued with a pronounced melancholy, is never strident or sanctimonious. It is through the symmetry of theme that Housman achieves the solemnity which lends these justly celebrated poems their stature.

I feel that any discussion of A. E. Housman's poetry should first acknowledge that he was never a poet in the same sense as Whitman, Auden or Ginsberg. he was first, and foremost, a scholar, the Chair of Latin at Cambridge and an academic legend. Thus it seems churlish for his detractors to take the rather meagre amount of poetry he produced and deride it for it's lack of thematic multiplicity.

A closeted homosexual, Housman's poetry is perhaps most distinctive for it allusive qualities. One revels in the allegorical poem XVIII from Additional Poems: "Oh they're taking him to prison for the colour of his hair." Perhaps my favorite in this collection full of favorites is XXXI from More Poems:

"Because I liked you better
Than suits a man to say,
It irked you, and I promised
To throw the thought away.

To put the world between us
We parted, stiff and dry;
'Good-bye', said you, 'forget me.'
'I will, no fear' said I.

If here, where clover whitens
The dead man's knoll, you pass,
And no tall flower to meet you
Starts in the trefoiled grass,

Halt by the headstone naming
The heart no longer stirred,
And say the lad that loved you
Was one that kept his word."

Haunting. First rate. A masterful collection.

Housman is a wonderful, lyrical poet. I bought this collection after having seen The Invention of Love on the London stage.

Most beautiful of all, to my mind, is the poem entitled "To an Athlete Dying Young". This was the eulogy read by Isak Dinesen at Denys Finch-Hatton's funeral in the movie "Out of Africa". The poem, which was originally included in "A Shropshire Lad" (1896) begins:

"The time you won your town the race, We chaired you through the market place. Man and boy stood cheering by and home we brought you shoulder high. Today the road all runners come, Shoulder-high we bring you home. And set you at your threshold down, Townsman of a stiller town. Smart lad! to slip betimes away from fields where glory does not stay And early though the laurel grows It withers quicker than the rose... And round that early laurelled head Will flock to gaze the strengthless dead, And find, unwithered on its curls, A garland. Briefer than a girl's."

A very moving and sad poem. Many of Housman's other poems are of a similar, outstanding quality. He was not a prolific poet, but he was certainly a great one. Great pleasure will be found in this collection.

I have never known how Housman got away with it, living at the time he did. He failed to obtain honours in his final Schools at Oxford but finished his life as Professor of Latin at Cambridge. He treated his fellow scholars with scarifying contempt in print. His poetry makes it clear without quite flaunting it that he was homoerotic (he would have hated 'homosexual'as being half-Greek half-Latin), and he was not only an atheist but downright blasphemous.

Obviously he is best known for his poetry. He was, or affected to be, surprised by the popular success of A Shropshire Lad with its pervasive fixation with death, but the reason is easy to see -- Housman's poetry is catchy. It has 'tingle-factor' in a big way, and the deadly simplicity haunts the memory

'So here I'll watch the night and wait
To see the morning shine
When he will hear the stroke of eight
And not the stroke of nine'
(of a man due to be hanged the next morning). In The Name and Nature of Poetry he makes a very entertaining attempt, largely at the expense of the eighteenth century style, to explain what poetry meant to him, but he gets the point across far better and more briefly in an address on Swinburne when he says 'poetry is a tone of voice, a way of saying things'. That illuminates the matter far better for me than any amount of pretentious lit crit.

The finest and most characteristic of all his poems is in Latin, the dedication of his great edition of Manilius to Moses Jackson. Those who have been privileged to study Greek and Latin while they were still mainstream subjects are not likely to forget its last four lines, among the most awesome in any language I can read, but in general I go along with the assessment of him as 'an absolutely marvellous minor poet'. As a scholar he was among the greatest, and he enlivened the dusty pages of classical scholarship with some of the most entertaining prose I have ever read. His address to the Classical Association is entitled uncompromisingly The Application of Thought to Textual Criticism, and his final words to his 'peers' -- 'one thing above all others is necessary, and that is to have a head, not a pumpkin, on your shoulders, and brains, not pudding, in your head' is only one specimen I can never forget. 'The habit of treading in ruts and trooping in companies that men share with sheep' or 'Stoeber's reprint of Bentley's text, with a commentary intended to refute it, saw the light in 1767 in Strasbourg, a city still famous for its geese' are others.

I neither know nor care what his relationship with Jackson amounted to in practice other than that Jackson was the love of his life. He did not hesitate to to publish in the press his brilliant satirical poem on the imprisonment of Oscar Wilde, and I gather there was a tacit understanding among the dons of Trinity never to refer to his poetry. That poem ends with another of his great fixations
'He can curse the God that made him for the colour of his hair.' Like other notable atheists, e.g. Johannes Brahms, Housman knew the scriptures inside-out and he made witty use of them -- I treasure in particular the scholar who 'has rendered Greek nonsense into English nonsense and gone on his way rejoicing'.

The photograph of him on the cover of this book is more favourable than many others which make him look as if he was descended from a long line of maiden aunts, as someone once said. Be that as it may, I recommend this book to anyone not yet familiar with a great mind and a brilliant and fascinating writer.

A spuperb bio of the scholar poet. The structure is interesting. First, the author presents a chronological look at Housman's life with some salient facts, emphasizing the most important influences in his life. The latter part of the book is devoted to closer scrutiny of the different aspects of his work and personal affairs taken separately: classical studies, family relationships, friendships, etc.

I read this in preparation for seeing the new Tom Stoppard play, " Invention of Love " which deals with Housman's somewhat tortured, but extremely productive life. Glad that I did. The book stands by itself as top biography.

This is a marvelous book. It has all the poems plus some new ones (new to me, and I thought I knew the work); the clear textual apparatus would have pleased the great textual scholar-poet himself. Moreover, the notes are truly helpful, adding information about botany, the classics, astrology, and other references that give the poetry additional depth and make these seemingly simple verses richer.

...Housman, Graves's biography tells us, wanted his books inexpensive so as to be widely available. Surely plasticated paper over boards in a perfect binding, no matter what the costs of storage and overhead may be, can't justify this steep a sum.

...in A. E. Housman's "A Shropshire Lad." He is obsessed with death and the brevity of time. He is determined to wring meaning out of a teen soldier's blood-soaked shirt, to bring beauty out of tragedy.

Poets' critical reputations move up and down like a sine curve. Given the increasingly unread status of poetry, however, one would think that Housman's rep would be on the upswing, since he presents his ideas with clear language, pleasant rhyme, simple trochaic or iambic meter, archetypal imagery, and intense emotion; his is among the most plain and accessible poetry a major author has ever crafted, a boon to the genre at a time it's largely being ignored.

Still, people tend to read Housman wrong. They claim he's either promoting or deriding war. In fact, he's doing neither; war is simply an unfortunate fact of life for Housman. People must confuse him for Wilfred Owen, who actually does fulminate against war or Rudyard Kipling, who actually does promote it.

... Even the lovely rural setting of the poems, which in another book he refers to as "the land of lost content," suggests the rapture and freedom of boyhood is being mourned as it passes. Battle death is often a stand-in here for the death of innocence. War is only slightly more awful toward the body than time itself. War is only Housman's metaphor; love is his objective.

This review refers to the Dover Thrift Edition Paperback of "A Shropshire Lad"....

Without getting too analytical of the poetry itself or the meaning of Housman's works,as I am not a poet myself, I will say that I throughly enjoyed this edition of "A Shropshire Lad". Although Housman's words at times may seem a bit like the antedote to exhilaration, he seems to speak from the heart and wisely about the cycle of life. The never ending scheme of things.The seasons and the earth changing year by year. Young men falling in love, going off to war, coming home wounded, dead, or finding their loves no longer want them. It brought to mind for me, the song by Peter, Paul and Mary "Where Have All The Flowers Gone".

Although these words were first published well over 100 years ago, I found there is still meaning in his words.Many of the lines in this book I found to still be quoted today. For example in poem LVI-"The Day of Battle", he ponders this:

"Comrade, if to turn and fly
Made a soldier never die,
Fly I would, for who would not?
Tis sure no pleasure to be shot

But since the man that runs away
Lives to die another day,
And cowards' funerals, when they come,
Are not wept so well at home,........."

This Dover Thrift Edition is a great value for the price. It contains all sixty-three original poems of "A Shropshire Lad" including XIX-"To An Athlete Dying Young"(which you've heard if you have seen the film "Out of Africa"). It has an index with notes on the text which will clarify some of the names and places Housman uses that might be of geographic or historical value to the reader, and also has an index of the first lines, helpful in finding a specific poem. It's a small lightweight book you can easily throw in your purse, briefcase or even a large pocket, that you can pull out to read while you have time to kill or while traveling. It's something to add to your cart when you need just a little bit more to put you into that free-shipping catagory!

Dover Thrift has many of these little books of great literary works, I plan on adding more to my collection....enjoy....Laurie

the title of 'A Shropshire Lad' indicates both rural specificity and human universality, and it is in the gap between the two that the poems' tension and tragedy lie. they evoke a timeless pastoral world, of streams, plains and roses; of ploughing, carousing and love-making; of villages, churches and football; all belonging to the unchanging cycle of the seasons. In this context man as a type, as a member of a community, is eternal also, not least in the folk idiom in which Housman's classical clarity is decaptively cloaked.

as an individual, however, the 'lad' is insubstantial, doomed to leave or die as rural life continues unchanging without him. Many of the poems are narrated by exiles or ghosts, crushed to find the old routine the same as if they had never existed - the phantom of 'Is my team ploughing?' discovers even his grieving sweetheart now warm in his interlocutor's bed; he of 'Bredon Hill' plans his wedding, only to attend his own funeral.

Housman uses a direct and simple vocabulary and metre with devastating resonances, the very music of the poetry at once rooted in the eternal communal land and yet indicative of sadness and loss. Written in 1896, the irony of death and change in the never-ending countryside was doubled by the reality that the countryside was changing, that the centuries-old lifestyles were being encroached on by industry and modernity - what seemed to be inviolable itself becomes obsolete. in hindsight, a third, poignant irony is added - within 20 years of publication, these lads would be sent to the slaughter in World War One, as previsioned in 'On the idle hill of summer'. One of Housman's greatest admirers, the composer George Butterworth, who wrote two song-cycles based on these beautiful poems, would be one such victim.

I like this play because it blends the aesthetic with the dramatic. It's aesthetic because it discusses the great works of literature with the great writers and critics of that time. It's dramatic because this discussion provides an interesting background to an issue that makes difficult the lives of the main characters A.E. Houseman and Oscar Wilde: homosexual love. For Houseman the problem is unrequited love. For Oscar Wilde it is a charge of sodomy.

The point of classical scholarship is to study Greek and Latin works-that is the vocation of the scholars in this play. According to Oscar Wilde, to be an "aesthete" means to believe that all beauty emanates from Greek writing and sculpture particularly sculpture of the nude male form. In the play A.E. Houseman and his scholarly contemporaries-Ruskin and Pater--point out that much Latin and Greek poetry was written by one man who was in love with another. What makes the play ironic is how this aspect of these ancient cultures flies in the face of contemporary Victorian mores. To wit: the characters in the play are homosexual and that was a crime in 19th century England.

Every work of art must have a point or it's pointless. The point in this play is how the definition of love has come full circle since ancient Greece: what was once socially acceptable, boy love (i.e. pedophilia), is now anathema. And what is at best today grudgingly tolerated, homosexual love, was common practice in ancient Greece at least among the dramatists, poets, and philosophers. Stoppard writes: "Before Plato could describe love, the loved one had to be invented." Hence the title: "Invention of Love".

When Houseman died he had been successful in his career but not in his desire for eros: He says "the grave's a fine and private place but none I think there do embrace".

As in many of his recent plays, Stoppard plays with and juxtaposes two eras, but this one has more humanity and depth of character than even Arcadia. This is only the second Stoppard play during which I have found myself, at various times, smiling broadly, laughing, and weeping. It contains several little bon mots that epitomize not only the action, but larger issues. For example, at one point a character askes another if he wants to do something. The other replies "I don't mind." The first ripostes "But you should: life is in the minding." (approximate quote)Some reviewers have been put off by the fact there are brief lines in classical Greek and in Latin. These are always explained, or their content is not relevant to the plot, but they do add to the sense of deep scholarship and love of learning that pervade this play. Anyone who cares about learning, individual freedom, and the lifelong development of character will appreciate this play. And it will keep you thinking what it would be like to apply the central device of the play to your own life: what person more than a couple decades old would not like to go back and anonymously meet his younger self?! What would you say?

The Invention of Love, in my opinion, Tom Stoppard's best play, opens with A.E. Housman being ferried across the River Styx by Charon, relieved to be dead at last. Or is he? Perhaps he is only dreaming from his bed in a rest home. One of the things that makes The Invention of Love so outstanding is Stoppard's wonderful mix of fantasy and reality. He combines the two so well, in fact, that we're never quite sure which is which. There are luminous scenes of young men rowing down the Thames to Hades, a marvelous Thameside encounter between the youthful Housman and his older self and an almost transcendent conclusion showing Housman stepping off-shore onto a watery-looking stage.

The Invention of Love successfully combines elements from Stoppard's previous plays: the wit and cleverness of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead with the emotional richness and intensity of The Real Thing to the purity of Arcadia. This is, however, a slower, more meditative and contemplative Stoppard. Even the flamboyant Oscar Wilde is presented in a toned-downed, rather Housmanesque style.

The script, itself, although erudite and intellectual, is so opulently rich in imagery and language (yes, there is a lot of Latin) that we, as an audience, are forced to be attentive. Stoppard rewards us handsomely, though, as we become increasingly aware that certain things (rivers, Hades, dogs, love, inventions, inversions, three men in a boat) circle and then loop back and circle again and again.

Those who think Housman's scholarliness might seem dull couldn't be more wrong. It is, instead, the very essence of this marvelous play. Stoppard uses lost Greek plays and corrupted Latin texts like the master he is. And he delivers a poignant message: Even great art contains within itself the seed of its own mortality. Although the artist (in this case, Housman) strives to produce a coherent and hopefully, immortal, body of work, time, itself, eventually leeches almost everything away until only fragments remain. This is a powerful message, to be sure, but in The Invention of Love, it is one that is both comforting and melancholy and sadly, we come to realize, all too true.