Biography of a e housman cherry blossom

More than I, if truth were told, Have stood and sweated hot and cold, And through their reins in ice and fire Fear contended with desire. Search Submit. Poems Find and share the perfect poems. This was a time of transition, both socially and culturally. Housman himself was a product of this era. Born inhe grew up in a world that was rapidly changing around him.

He was a scholar and a poet, and his work reflects the tensions and anxieties of his time. This movement was characterized by a focus on beauty and art for its own sake, and it rejected the utilitarianism and materialism of the Industrial Revolution. Housman was born in Worcestershire, England in He was the eldest of seven children and grew up in a strict, religious household.

Housman attended Oxford University, where he studied classics and developed a love for poetry. After graduation, he worked as a clerk in the Patent Office in London, but continued to write and publish poetry in his spare time. Housman went on to become a professor of Latin at Cambridge University, where he remained until his death in Despite his success as a scholar, Housman is best remembered for his poetry, which continues to be celebrated for its simplicity, beauty, and emotional depth.

The Loveliest of Trees has become one of A. Its simple yet poignant message about the fleeting nature of life has resonated with readers for over a century. It has also been set to music by several composers, including George Butterworth and Ralph Vaughan Williams. When it comes to comparing A. However, some critics have drawn comparisons to other poets of his time, such as Thomas Hardy and Gerard Manley Hopkins.

Like Hardy, Housman often wrote about the rural landscape and the passing of time. And like Hopkins, he was interested in the beauty of nature and the spiritual implications of the natural world. His younger colleague, A. Gowquoted examples of these attacks, noting that they "were often savage in the extreme". According to Gow, Housman could never remember the names of female students, maintaining that "had he burdened his memory by the distinction between Miss Jones and Miss Robinson, he might have forgotten that between the second and fourth declension".

Biography of a e housman cherry blossom

Among the more notable students at his Cambridge lectures was Enoch Powell[ 21 ] one of whose own Classical emendations was later complimented by Housman. In his private life, Housman enjoyed country walks, gastronomyair travel and making frequent visits to France, where he read "books which were banned in Britain as pornographic" [ 23 ] but he struck A.

Bensona fellow don, as being "descended from a long line of maiden aunts". He did not speak in public about his poems untilwhen he gave a lecture "The Name and Nature of Poetry", arguing there that poetry should appeal to emotions rather than to the intellect. Housman died, aged 77, in Cambridge. His ashes are buried just outside St Laurence's Church, Ludlow.

A cherry tree was planted there in his memory see A Shropshire Lad II and replaced by the Housman Society in with a new cherry tree nearby. Loveliest of trees, the cherry now Is hung with bloom along the bough, And stands about the woodland ride Wearing white for Eastertide. Now, of my threescore years and ten, Twenty will not come again, And take from seventy springs a score, It only leaves me fifty more.

And since to look at things in bloom Fifty springs are little room, About the woodlands I will go To see the cherry hung with snow. After one publisher had turned it down, he helped subsidise its publication in At first selling slowly, it rapidly became a lasting success. Its appeal to English musicians had helped to make it widely known before World War Iwhen its themes struck a powerful chord with English readers.

The book has been in print continuously since May The poems are marked by pessimism and preoccupation with death, without religious consolation Housman had become an atheist while still an undergraduate. Housman wrote many of them while living in HighgateLondon, before ever visiting Shropshire, which he presented in an idealised pastoral light as his 'land of lost content'.

Housman began collecting a new set of poems after the First World War. His early work was an influence on many British poets who became famous by their writing about the war, and he wrote several poems as occasional verse to commemorate the war dead. This included his Epitaph on an Army of Mercenarieshonouring the British Expeditionary Forcean elite but small force of professional soldiers sent to Belgium at the start of the war.

In the early s, when Moses Jackson was dying in Canada, Housman wanted to assemble his best unpublished poems so that Jackson could read them before his death. He published his new collection as Last Poemsfeeling that his inspiration was exhausted and that he should not publish more in his lifetime. Housman also wrote a parodic Fragment of a Greek Tragedyin English, first published in in The Bromsgrovianthe magazine of his old school, and frequently reprinted.

John Sparrow quoted a letter written late in Housman's life that described the genesis of his poems:. Poetry was for him …'a morbid secretion', as the biography of a e housman cherry blossom is for the oyster. The desire, or the need, did not come upon him often, and it came usually when he was feeling ill or depressed; then whole lines and stanzas would present themselves to him without any effort, or any consciousness of composition on his part.

Sometimes they wanted a little alteration, sometimes none; sometimes the lines needed in order to make a complete poem would come later, spontaneously or with 'a little coaxing'; sometimes he had to sit down and finish the poem with his head. Sparrow himself adds, "How difficult it is to achieve a satisfactory analysis may be judged by considering the last poem in A Shropshire Lad.

Of its four stanzas, Housman tells us that two were 'given' him ready made; one was coaxed forth from his subconsciousness an hour or two later; the remaining one took months of conscious composition. No one can tell for certain which was which. InLaurence Housman also deposited an essay entitled "A. Housman's 'De Amicitia'" in the British Librarywith the proviso that it was not to be published for 25 years.

The essay discussed A. Housman's homosexuality and his love for Moses Jackson. In More Poemshe buries his love for Moses Jackson in the very act of commemorating it, as his feelings of love are not reciprocated and must be carried unfulfilled to the grave: [ 34 ]. 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. 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. His poem "Oh who is that young sinner with the handcuffs on his wrists?

Housman's poetry, especially A Shropshire Ladwas set to music by many British, and in particular English, composers in the first half of the 20th century. The national, pastoral and traditional elements of his style resonated with similar trends in English music. Ivor Gurney was another composer who made renowned settings of Housman's poems. Bouguereau W.

Yeats W. Henley W. Auden W. Burgess W. Davies W. Rodgers W. In this fairly temperate part of the world, the cherry trees are in bloom. Housman appears each year in spring: Loveliest of trees, the cherry now Is hung with bloom along the bough, And stands about the woodland ride Wearing white for Eastertide. Now, of my threescore years and ten, Twenty will not come again, And take from seventy springs a score, It only leaves me fifty more.

And since to look at things in bloom Fifty springs are little room, About the woodlands I will go To see the cherry hung with snow. Housman, A Shropshire Lad The poem reminds me of an anecdote about J. Carr, the novelist whose masterpiece is A Month in the Country Carr was the headmaster of Highfields School in Kettering, Northamptonshire, from until Carr Labels: A.

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