About the Books

A.E. Housman (1859-1936): Born in Fockbury, Worcestershire, Alfred Edward Housman attented Bromsgrove School and St. John's College, Oxford. On leaving University he worked for some time at the Patent Office, London.  His classical studies published in specialist journals earned him the chair of Latin in the University College of London.  Some time later he joined the University of Cambridge to become one of the fellows of Trinity Cillege and Kennedy Professon of Latinn in the university.

Kegan Paul published the first and most famous of Houseman's collections of verse,  A Shropshire Lad creted a stir in the literary world of the time but it took a decade for the Shropshire poems to become the best-selling anthology of poetry  in the early years of the 20th century.  Housman's poetic output is mall but not so small as is popularly held.

This present work on Housman, A.E. Housman: His Personality, Poetics and Poetry, emphasizes the centrality of Houseman's poetics and poetic technique to an adequate understanding of Housman's poetry and its significance.

Dr. Sanyal examines closely a fair number of Housman's poems in the light of the poetics of Housman, which Dr. Sanya has deligently reconstruced, to show how Housman carried over into his technique the schism in his own soul and in the soul of his age, by allowing a multiplicity of responses to integrate themselves into a stasis.  This was uniquely Housman's way of 'harmonizing the sadness of the universe'. In the process his poetry remains not merely a cri de coeur but vecomes a cri de siecle.

The author will think himself rewarded if the present work succeeds in dispelling the long-cherished notion that Housman was little more than one of the literary hyacinths that grew in plenty in the sandy soil of fin-de-siecle English poetry at the end of the 19th century.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

Contents

1. Houseman: The Man and the Mask
2. Fin de siecle:  The Social and Poetical Scene
3. ‘The Stinging Nettle’: Housman and His Critics
4. Housman’s Concept of Poetry: Harmonization of the Sadness of the Universe
5. Housman’s Prose: Refracted Poetic Technique
6. Housman’s Light Verse: Averted Nonsense
7. Early Poems of Housman: Their Prrecocity and Promise
8. ‘Reins in Ice and Fire’: The Poetry of Tension
9. Conclusion