The Poetry of A. E. Housman Essay -- essays research papers

The Poetry of A. E. HousmanHousman was born in Burton-On-Trent, England, in 1865, just as the US Civil War was ending. As a young child, he was tired of(p) by the news of slaughter from the former British colonies, and was affected deeply. This turned him into a brooding, introverted teenager and a misanthropic, pessimistic adult. This outlook on bread and butter shows clearly in his poetry. Housman believed that people were generally evil, and that life conspired against mankind. This is evident not only in his poetry, but also in his short stories. For example, his story, The Child of Lancashire, create in 1893 in The London Gazette, is about an child who travels to London, where his parents die, and he becomes a street urchin. There are veiled implications that the child is a homosexual (as was Housman, more or less probably), and he becomes mixed up with a gang of similar youths, attacking affluent pedestrians and stealing their watches and gold coins. Eventually he leaves th e gang and becomes wealthy, but is attacked by the same gang (who dont recognize him) and is thrown off London Bridge into the Thames, which is unfortunately frozen over, and is killed on the hard ice below. Housmans poetry is similarly pessimistic. In fully half the poems the speaker is dead. In others, he is about to die or wants to die, or his girlfriend is dead. Death is a really important defend of life to Housman without death, Housman would probably not have been able to be a poet. (Housman, himself, died ...