His poetry was less well-known (and received less critical acclaim) than his translations, and he only lectured on poetry once.Ĭomposer George Butterworth's 'Songs based on Housman’s 'A Shropshire Lad' written in 1909-1911. Housman taught at Cambridge University from 1911 until he died in 1936. Housman, would be a proponent of humble, unadorned verse. Housman's 'The Name and Nature of Poetry'Ī surprise, perhaps, that one of the world's greatest classics scholar A. Such discoveries are no more poetical than anagrams such pleasure as they give is purely intellectual and is intellectually frivolous.įrom A. There was a whole age of English in which the place of poetry was usurped by something very different which possessed the proper and specific name of wit: wit not in its modern sense, but as defined by Johnson, 'a combination of dissimilar images, or discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike'. All the more reason why we should not confound confusion worse by wresting the term to licentious use and affixing it either to dissimilar things already provided with names of their own, or to new things for which new names should be invented. Warning against the intellectual frivolity of poetry, the classics scholar Alfred Edward Housman (Ma– April 30, 1936) argued the meaning of poetry should be simple, not overloaded with unlike things: I said that the legitimate meanings of the word poetry were themselves so many as to embarrass the discussion of its nature.

A shropshire lad list of poems