Housman, A(lfred) E(dward) (1859–1936)

English poet and classical scholar. His A Shropshire Lad (1896), a series of deceptively simple, nostalgic, ballad-like poems, has been popular since World War I. This was followed by Last Poems (1922), More Poems (1936), and Collected Poems (1939).

As a scholar his great work was his edition of the Roman poet Manilius, which is a model of textual criticism and marks him as one of the greatest English Latinists; he also edited the works of Juvenal and Lucan.

Housman was born in Fockbury, Worcestershire, educated at Oxford, although he failed his finals, and worked as a clerk in Her Majesty's Patents Office from 1882. He continued his study of the classics, and in 1892 became professor of Latin at University College, London; he held a similar post at Cambridge from 1911. In 1933 he delivered a lecture, ‘The Name and Nature of Poetry’, which embodied his poetic theories.