Contents: Introduction Author Biography Poem Text Poem Summary Themes Style Historical Context Critical Overview Sources For Further Study

Criticism

Bruce Meyer

Bruce Meyer is the director of the creative writing program at the University of Toronto. He has taught at several Canadian universities and is the author of three collections of poetry. In the following essay, Meyer considers “To an Athlete Dying Young” as a hymn in the tradition of heroic elegy.

The poetry of A. E. Housman stands as a bridge between the pastoral Romanticism of poets such as John Clare (to whom he owes a debt of both lyricism and directness) and the early-twentieth century phenomenon of The Georgians (with whom he shares a love of elegantly crafted rhyme and an eye for the fragile and fleeting beauty of nature). Housman’s “To an Athlete Dying Young” is a marker of his status in the English canon. On the one hand, he glories in the hymnal stanza structure, the fluid and musical sense of rhyme that he applies to a simple but heartfelt tribute; and on the other hand, he engages the great tradition of the heroic elegy that locates the dead or dying hero in the contexts of nature and society. The poem is a mixture of the simple and the complex, of the immortal and the temporal, and of the social and the natural.

The poem tells the story of a young athlete, the hero of his community, whose life has been cut short for unknown reasons. The dichotomy within the poem is the gap between life and death. When the young hero was the town’s athletic champion “We chaired you through the market-place; / Man and boy stood cheering by, / And home we brought you shoulder-high.” The triumphant procession of the athlete’s moment of glory is contrasted with his funeral procession: “To-day, the road all runners come, / Shoulder-high we bring you home, / And set you at your threshold down, / Townsman of a stiller town.” The repetition of the phrase “shoulder-high” creates a contrast between life and death and triumph and tragedy. The tension within that contrast is not just the simple semantic difference between carrying the young man aloft in a moment of triumph and a coffin being borne to its final resting place, but also the great gap in which grief transforms the vitality and exuberance of nature into the “The garland briefer than a girl’s.”

The “garland” in the final line is a peculiar image, because, in the context of Housman’s poem, it has many meanings. In the first sense, the “garland” is the laurels, the traditional reward for triumphant athletes — a badge of honor dating back to classical Greece. As tradition suggests, the victors in athletic competitions at the early Olympic games were not presented with medals but with “garlands” of laurel leaves, a tribute symbolic of the god Apollo, whose favored attributes included both athletic pursuits and poetry. In the second sense, the “garland” is a gathering of poetic verses, usually hymns in praise of life, a term that was applied to popular anthologies and collections of verse in the nineteenth century. The difference between the two crownings of garlands is the irony at the heart of the poem. The hero’s crown of laurels, the esteem and tribute that the town pays the athlete on his victory, withers away like the floral headgear of a young girl. The message is that death is the ultimate victor.

What death takes away is not simply a hero but the joys and sorrows of life. In the opening of

“The difference between the two crownings of garlands is the irony at the heart of the poem.... The message is that death is the ultimate victor.”

the third stanza, Housman remarks ironically that it may have been a smart move to die so young: “Smart lad, to slip betimes away / From fields where glory does not stay ...” The first echo in this line is the famous phrase from Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”: “The paths of glory lead but to the grave.” The suggestion on Housman’s part is a traditional one — that all glory is fleeting, especially glory attained through physical beauty or skills. Sic transit gloria mundi as the Romans would say, or “so passes the glory of the world.” This statement encapsulates the nature of memorial elegy where the poet is apt to muse not on the death of an individual but on the entropy of the world and the intransigence of society, civilization, and reality. Allen Tate, another poet who works “the graveyard shift” in his elegizing, does much the same thing in his poem “Ode to the Confederate Dead,” where he observes the passing of an entire society (that of the antebellum American South) by musing on the decay of a graveyard. Housman, like Gray before him and Tate after him, feels compelled to locate part of the poem’s imagery in a graveyard. But unlike his predecessors, Housman takes the reader inside the grave where “earth has stopped the ears” and a “silence sounds no worse than cheers.” The mockery death makes of the athlete by transmuting the aspects of glory into the aspects of tragedy is part of the overwhelming sense of irony that these “graveyard” poems convey. What the reader is meant to see in these works is not merely an expression of grief, but also a close rendering of death, so that the awareness that comes from the poem is an awareness of life’s frailty and the solemn seriousness and finality that effects the ultimate closure.

The second echo in those important lines “Smart lad, to slip betimes away / From fields where glory does not stay ...” is the resonance of the problems of life. The poet seems almost to be addressing the woes of aging in much the same way that Yeats addressed the problems of growing old in “Among School Children.” In what seems like a poignant and almost late-Romantic gesture, aging is perceived as something that is without glory or value — the same sort of fear of growing old that is often echoed in rock lyrics, such as Neil Young’s phrase “Better to burn out than fade away.” What underlies Housman’s statement is the classical notion of the physical ideal — that human beings have a moment of ripeness and excellence that once passed can only haunt the individual with its loss. The fate of the athlete who lives beyond his prime, Housman speculates, is the fear of outliving one’s glory or having “the name” die “before the man.” The athletic ideal, of which the young athlete is a paragon, is a moment that must be seized and celebrated. Life for an athlete, Housman seems to imply, is about personal glory. Or is it?

In the opening stanza of the poem, the towns-people “chaired” the athlete “through the market-place” during his moment of victory. He was their champion, the embodiment of the aspirations of the group, the society. When the young athlete dies, he takes with him those aspirations, so that a large part of what the town is spiritually dies with him. In this sense, Housman’s athlete is not just a dead hero or even a moribund protagonist from a pastoral elegy; instead, he is a symbol in much the same way that Sir Galahad, the pure and perfect knight of The Quest for the Holy Grail, is a symbol of the perfection and idealism that society craves. For Housman, the young athlete is an object onto whom aspirations are projected. His success, by vicarious means, becomes the townspeople’s success. And, by corollary, his death becomes their death as well. Like Sir Galahad, whose sacrificial death brings life to the wasteland of the Arthurian quest Romances, (or like Christ, whose death and harrowing of Hell on Holy Saturday in the mythos of the Christian tradition is a moment when the gates of the underworld are flung open for the release of the faithful), the young athlete is expected to perform a nekusis, or journey to the underworld. In classical epics, such as Homer’s The Odyssey or Virgil’s The Aeneid, the champion or hero goes down into the underworld to glean information about the future in order to bring about a just reward for his society. In the Christian tradition, the death of Christ and his journey to the underworld (before he rose, on the third day) is for the sake of the salvation of the community of believers. Housman, in the penultimate stanza of “To an Athlete Dying Young” connects the death of a local sports hero to this broader tradition: “So set, before its echoes fade, / The fleet foot on the sill of shade....” What is expected of the young man is that in the “sill of shade,” that world beyond this one, he will still maintain his speed and his athletic prowess. Even in death, he is the defender of the “challenge-cup” and is the people’s champion.

What “To an Athlete Dying Young” appears to be is more than an elegy; it is a Romance. In Romance literature, the focus is upon the hero, the champion, who is the embodiment of the total society. Housman does not lament a fall in nature as much as he attempts to celebrate and pay tribute to an individual on whose shoulders rode the hopes of the community. The loss, though it now rests on the community’s shoulders, is an opportunity to focus communal attention on what is “ideal” in the common mind to the point that the young man’s celebrity will continue even after death. In the final stanza, Housman implies that the dead will find in the hero the admirable qualities that the living celebrated: “And round that early-laureled head / Will flock to gaze the strengthless dead....” Perhaps, Housman tries to tell us, glory is greater than the grave, and that the point of existence is to achieve something memorable, whether it be a moment of physical prowess or the creation of an intriguing poem. After all, the poem is written in a hymnal stanza, and the point of a hymn is that it should be recited and sung by a group of supplicants, those who believe in an idea or an individual.

Source: Bruce Meyer, in an essay for Poetry for Students, Gale Group, 2000.

Sean Robisch

Sean Robisch teaches composition and literature at Purdue University and holds a Ph.D. in American literature. In the following essay, Robisch defends Housman against critics who would belittle his work.

A. E. Housman was the quintessential British “man of letters”: he was educated at Oxford; a professor of classics; author of a multivolume work on Roman poet and mathematician Marcus Manilius; a social recluse at times while seeking the fame of a writing career — Housman even wrote in the way we might consider characteristic of the turn-of-the-century poet/scholar. He considered his poetry from an apartment overlooking the Shropshire hills, took long while walks ruminating about his verse, and then produced several poems in a flurry of work. Twenty-three of the poems in A Shropshire Lad, the book in which “To An Athlete Dying Young” appears, were written in five months with little revision. The poems are formal in construction and follow relatively simple rhyme and metrical schemes. But in some ways, their simplicity is deceptive, and despite Housman’s only having produced three works of poetry during his lifetime (a fourth appeared posthumously), he wrote several of the most memorable poems of the last century.

Critics since Housman’s time have been divided over whether he was a major or minor poet, though such verdicts are always a bit artificial. He was a contemporary of Oscar Wilde, a significant fact for more than literary reasons. Though nearly Wilde’s opposite in personality (Housman was, publicly, cool and aloof), he similarly sought fame and suffered in an era during which persecution for homosexuality was severe. Housman was the kind of person who may well have risked being ostracized because of his particular combination of reclusive misanthropy and compassion for the individual; when A Shropshire Lad was published, Housman gave his royalties to the publishers in order to keep the cost of the book down so that the poor might read it. Wilde went to prison for his flair as much as for his sexuality, and some critics speculate that Housman withheld some of his own poems, to be published after his death, for fear of being oppressed as well. He sent Wilde a copy of A Shropshire Lad during Wilde’s imprisonment, and many of his poems express the similar sentiment of the older gentleman as mentor to the younger man of whom he is enamored.

All of this biographical background is important to understanding “To An Athlete Dying Young” and many other of Housman’s poems — but not because they act as sexual metaphors. On the contrary; many of the poems are examples of transcending cultural oppression and mere physical attraction. They grow out of the Greek ideals of purity in love and admiration and complexity of thought about what it means to be great. Housman often writes about the ideal man — the athlete/soldier at the beginning of his intellectual apprenticeship. It is one of the most exciting times in life and is a popular subject matter for poetry. The American figure that best embodies this impulse to write as mentor to the younger man is Walt Whitman; in Great Britain it was people such as Tennyson, Wilde, and Housman.

His subject matter has therefore subjected Housman to the criticism of readers who see his

“His subject matter has ... subjected Housman to the criticism of readers who see his poetry as ‘adolescent’ rather than as only regarding adolescence.”

poetry as “adolescent” rather than as only regarding adolescence. Especially during the modern era, when the thinking regarding poetic form was experiencing drastic changes, Housman’s work seemed anachronistic to some; his verse from 1936 seems very much the same as that from 1896. Forty years hardly dented his choice of style — the short stanza, long sustainment of theme in consecutive poems, and accessible rhyming verse.

But rather than judge Housman as being limited in his poetic range, we should perhaps view him as simply consistent, stalwart, and committed. Instead of reading his work as the efforts of an adolescent thinker in adulthood, we would do better to see him as someone acquainted with the complexity of adolescence. This perspective is important when we are first learning to appreciate poetry; the critic is often far more guilty of criticizing youthful thought than is the writer of fiction and poetry (who perhaps better remembers that time and mindset). When Housman looked out at the Shropshire Hills, he imagined a young man growing up as a lower-middle-class laborer, an athlete, and a local hero, who would then find the lasting payment for his greatness only in death.

Here, then, is another criticism of Housman’s work — that it is depressing. In 1898, William Archer wrote that Houseman had “three main topics: a stoical pessimism; a dogged rather than exultant patriotism; and what I may perhaps call a wistful cynicism.” He went on to list Housman’s major themes: “the mutability of human feeling, the ease with which the dead are forgot, the anguish of love unrequited, and the danger that long life may mean slow degradation.” This is a good list; it sums up quite a bit of Housman’s work, and it was written long before the rest of his poems appeared. But Archer also says that Housman deals with these themes “compassionately,” a distinction that is important.

Housman struggled to balance a number of contradictory emotions in his poetry, just as he did in his own life. When his mother died and he was left to the limited affection of his father, he turned to his studies. When his affection for his closest friend, Moses Jackson, was rejected, he turned again to his work and maintained their friendship. When he failed a major exam at Oxford that kept him from achieving honors and resulted in his working as a patent clerk instead of a professor (for a while), he wrote poetry about the working class and the hero of the local people. He referred, in one of his lectures, to the pleasure of poetry that is inspired by pain. Housman once wrote of the physical excitement that comes to a poet from writing a good line, even while the inspiration for such a line is a “passive and involuntary” condition — an acceptance rather than something forced. War, too, received Housman’s bittersweet treatment. He thought of it as a combination of “glamour and waste.”

Critic Guy Boas thought that this lack of closure and attention to paradox was a deficiency of Housman’s. “At the end,” Boas writes, “we have learnt from [the poems] no more of the meaning of life and nature than when we began.” This perspective seems a bit short sighted and is indicative of the misinterpretation of Housman’s deceptive simplicity. Emily Dickinson had been accused of the same failure to “close” a poem, but over time, many critics have come to realize that lurking beneath rhyme, meter, and the clever turn of phrase, may be truly emotional and challenging subject matter. The same considerations can be afforded ‘To an Athlete Dying Young.”

The poem is the nineteenth in a series of sixty-three related ones — some of which are titled and some of which have only numbers. This means that “To An Athlete Dying Young” needs to be accepted in the context of A Shropshire Lad; it is very similar to other poems in the volume (such as “When I Was One-and-Twenty” and “The Day of Battle”). And A Shropshire Lad needs to be seen in context with the rest of Housman’s poems as well; the case may be made that all of Housman’s work — the full forty years’ worth — may be read as a continuous volume that episodes toward his Collected Poems. Housman, as with many poets who write formal verse, is best read one poem at a time over an extended period. Upon the second, third, or fourth readings, his work may be taken in larger doses, with many poems read at a time. For now, I’ll consider “To An Athlete Dying Young” as a piece that stands alone.

You might consider whether or not you think sports are a training ground for war. Housman gives us a disturbing image of their similarity: after a race in which the local Shropshire Lad is a hero, the town carries him on their shoulders (“We chaired you”). In the next stanza, they carry him “shoulder-high” again, but this time in a casket. He is the “townsman of a stiller town,” a town of the dead. We see Housman’s “stoical pessimism” here; in his estimation, all runners take the road to that stiller town.

The third stanza functions as a cynical eulogy, with the narrator declaring to the dead runner that he was wisest when he turned his attention away from glory and toward what lasts longer. In the fourth stanza, the narrator explains his pessimistic outlook. The fifth stanza is an admonishment against “glory days” thinking. Some lads, the narrator tells us, outlived their glory. The line “And the name died before the man” tells us that the fame of many other men was forgotten before they died, and they lived to see this loss. In the young athlete’s case, his reputation will outlive him, because the townspeople remembers the race even as it buries him. Here again is a deeply complex emotional paradox — the kind of stuff Housman liked to demonstrate. Is it better, he seems to ask, to outlive your fame or to have it outlive you?

The label for this sentiment is “carpe diem,” which translates from the Latin as “seize the day.” Many writers who influenced Housman saw youth as the moment of glory, during which we must live brightly and greatly as the Greek ideal, for tomorrow we may die. Stanza six expresses this sentiment directly, but with some sadness. The athlete our narrator envisions is just about to die, and, at the moment of his death, he holds up to the lintel (the cross beam to the top of a door in this case, the door to the “stiller town”) his award.

We are not told that the athlete has died in a battle; most critics assume this based on the context of the volume’s other poems. But, by any means, the death comes “early.” When the rest of the dead come to view the new arrival in their town, they find “a garland briefer than a girl’s” on the athlete’s head. Housman compares the laurel, the traditional Greek honor given to the winner of an athletic event, to mere fashion. What a young girl might put in her hair for an occasion outlasts the honor of a young man who ran well but who died too soon.

“To An Athlete Dying Young” is a sad poem. It is important to note that the concept of carpe diem, while on the surface seeming like a rally or a slogan of encouragement, is, instead, a mixture of emotions. It encompasses the passionate intensity and strength in the moment, but also the pain of understanding one’s own mortality. Sadness, even cynicism, can ignite us to think more carefully about what we consider to be important about such subjects as glory and finality. Housman’s own disappointments and the poetry that came out of them, even while he was playing the part of the effete scholar, testify that his commitment — to a philosophy that was both dark and instructive, both simply constructed and deeply resonant, written for youth in the memory of what it meant to him to be youthful — would remain undaunted and would be remembered even beyond his lifetime.

Source: Sean Robisch, in an essay for Poetry for Students, Gale Group, 2000.

Kristina Zarlengo

Kristina Zarlengo, who holds a Ph.D. in English from Columbia University, taught literature and writing for five years and regularly publishes articles on modern American literature. In the following essay, Zarlengo praises “To an Athlete Dying Young” despite claims that it and other of Housman’s works are brooding, with a “stubborn preoccupation with pain.”

A. E. Housman was first and always a rigorous scholar of classics; that he is more famous for his verse has to do, first, with poetry’s wider audience than that for translated and annotated Greek and Latin works and, more important, with the almost instant accessibility of Housman’s poems. Formal in style, his rhymed and strictly metered poems are dotted with phrases sometimes made awkward or remote to modern ears. Nevertheless, Housman’s fans are many and various, and they have been so since the publication, in 1896, of his first book of poems, A Shropshire Lad. (By 1902, this volume was in its fourth edition.) Housman’s popularity is most easily attributable to his impressive ability to capture poignant feelings of a particular sort — impressions of the sad transience of the world and what beauty or virtue it holds. The pitter-patter of his style assists greatly in this task, in that his often merry rhythms cut the doom with something lighter. Certainly in “To an Athlete Dying Young,” he is able to fully draw out, in all of its permutations, the tragic irony of young death. Housman began writing poetry in the face of loss. Moses Jackson, his great friend (whom some believe Housman loved romantically, and who he had come to know as a classmate at Oxford College), had early spurned Housman’s desire to become more intimate. The two had remained friends, but in the space of a few years, Jackson married and moved to India. During the same, brief period in Housman’s late youth, Jackson’s younger brother, Adalbert, died of typhoid. After this sad time, Housman began writing and publishing his poems. In the two volumes of poetry published in his lifetime (as well as in a third, published posthumously), Housman proves himself a poet of small scope: he never much diverges, in theme or style, from concentrated, emotional autopsies of tragic death, tragic love, and tragic life.

That Housman’s is a poetry lush with the minutia of pain — pretty songs of woe — has attracted much disapproval of it as too narrow and “adolescent” in its stubborn preoccupation with pain. In a poem written as a commentary on Housman, titled “A.E.H.,” Kingsley Amis labels him “one who nightlong curses / Wounds imagined more than seen, / Who in level tones rehearses / What the fact of wounds must mean.” American poet Ezra Pound, who was a contemporary of Housman’s, but who, in poetic sensibility, was thoroughly remote from him, disliked Housman enough to parody his poetry in an unaffectionate poem of his own:

Mr. Housman’s Message
 
O woe, woe,
People are born and die,
We also shall be dead pretty soon
Therefore let us act as if we were
dead already.
 
The bird sits on the hawthorn tree
But he dies also, presently.
Some lads get hung, and some get shot.
Woeful is the human lot.
Woe! Woe, etcetera ....
 
London is a woeful place,
Shropshire is much pleasanter.
Then let us smile a little space
 
Upon fond nature’s morbid grace.
Oh, Woe, woe, woe, etcetera ....
(1926)

But even though Amis’s and Pound’s emphasis that a little brooding goes a long way is well taken, and Housman’s poetry, taken as a whole, is indeed manifestly preoccupied with self-similar themes of woe, such judgments do not easily stick to individual poems. Taken by themselves, many of Housman’s poems are in fact jewels — careful, dense, thorough expressions of familiar, wresting sentiments. Though Housman’s poetic output was not great, and his range was limited, many of his poems are perfect.

“To an Athlete Dying Young” is another of Housman’s many cries of “woe, woe, woe.” Its subject is one of unambiguous tragedy: the death of youth. In describing it, Housman squeezes from it still more woe, for the death comes out looking fortunate; the lad is “smart” for dying. In so celebrating tragic death, the world and life itself are made to seem woeful. Nevertheless, there is great craft in how Housman goes about phrasing his message. More important, the poem brings tragic irony so far — doubling it, then doubling it again — that a much greater range of suggestiveness comes through than in Pound’s limp “woe, etcetera.” Housman’s fierce concentration and refined turns of phrase involve us readers.

The poem begins a little awkwardly, and simply, describing the cheers of townspeople who celebrate their local representative in a footrace after he has won it. In a familiar ritual of victory, they carry the youth home, “chaired” at their shoulders. In the second stanza is a perfect parallel to that victory: again the townspeople carry the youth at their shoulders and again he is brought home. This time, however, he travels not the road of the race, but “the road all runners come” — the passage to death — and he is carried in a coffin, borne by pallbearers. Already the poem has surprised us; quickly, the person addressed as “you” by the poet has gone from being celebrated alive to being celebrated dead. But the next stanza’s beginning holds a further shock by proclaiming the victim a “Smart lad.” Prepared by the irony of the second stanza to think upon the athlete’s death as the opposite of natural or good, we then learn, from the speaker of the poem, that an escape into death is a wise choice — an evasion of fields where a fall from glory is inevitable. Yet this message, too, is undercut — this time by the mounting rhythm of the poem, which is extremely regular. Each quatrain (or stanza of four lines) is formed of two rhyming couplets (an aabb rhyme scheme), and most lines are composed of iambs, so that each sounds like ta-TA, ta-TA, ta-TA, ta-TA, over and over. It is not a mournful rhythm, and it grants the speaker distance from his subject matter, a tone of formal control over what is described. The following three stanzas elaborate on the third. Why is the lad smart? Because he has managed to avoid the possibility of being bested in future races; he will never “see the record cut.” He need never worry himself about regaining the kind of applause he already earned once, because he is insensate. Never will his life beat him in another race — that between his life’s span and his good reputation. In other words, he has cheated life before life could cheat him. And cheat him, it seems, it would have done, since the ranks of men who outlive their own selves by outliving their honor or their good name is swollen. Here, Housman suggests yet another race. First was the footrace the youth won; then the mournful “race” of the funeral procession. The third, a race between the lad and life, is teased out of the athlete’s death. Life wanted to see his reputation decayed and his victory reduced to a memory, but by dying when his triumph is fresh, the youth has beaten life and stolen away its threat. The runner wins this race by remaining perfectly still, frozen in rigor mortis, his quick feet “set.” But like a photograph of a runner that freezes vivid motion mid-stride, life has been stilled at the moment of its greatest intensity; this, in an instance of acute irony, is a vigorous death. As if this now tripled race were not enough, Housman gives another metaphor still one more variation. In the final stanza, the speaker envisions a second crowd applauding and admiring the youth: the dead. They will flock to him, the speaker claims, and will discover on him a fresh garland, that of honor and beauty, undisturbed by decay. So again, the youth will be hailed, and again he will triumph.

That the poem insists so heavily, ironically, and regularly on the good fortune of this lad begins to seem too insisted upon to be quite true. This brings into question the speaker’s situation. Who was this lad to the speaker? Is the speaker as controlled as his speech? Might that control be an armor against the tragedy of this death? Some will read Housman’s insistence on the happy fact of youthful death literally; others will read it as a sign that the speaker is so greatly bereaved that he considers his dead loved one to be the luckier one, as the world without him is no world at all. In either case, Housman has drummed on tragedy all the more loudly for his regular beat and light touch. Just when you think he has exhausted his exploration of the dimensions of this death, he develops a new one. Even if of limited scope, this is a poem of perfectly thorough exploration of its subject. The poem folds together three races (the footrace, the funeral march, the race against decay); three youthful triumphs (over the other runners, over those whose glory dies, over life); and two worlds (the

“Even if of limited scope, [‘To an Athlete Dying Young’] is a poem of perfectly thorough exploration of its subject.”

living and the dead). It is happy and tragic all at once that this athlete, still celebrated by the living, is now celebrated by the dead.

The situation of “To an Athlete Dying Young” makes little sense — this land of the dead is a nebulous place, and why should there be any joy at all in tragedy? But, here, Housman is true to poetic principles he later articulated in what has become a notorious 1933 lecture, at Cambridge University, called “The Name and Nature of Poetry.” The function of poetry, he claimed, is “to transfuse emotion — not to transmit thought but to set up in the reader’s sense a vibration corresponding to what was felt by the writer”; and “Meaning is of the intellect, poetry is not.” He asked (as noted in Richard Perceval Graves’s A. E. Housman: The Scholar-Poet),

What is it that can draw tears, as I know it can, to the eyes of more readers than one? What in the world is there to cry about? Why have mere words the physical effect of pathos when the sense of the passage is blithe and gay? I can only say, because they are poetry, and find their way into something in man which is obscure and latent, something older than the present organization of his nature, like the patches of fen which still linger here and there in the drained lands of Cambridgeshire.

While poetry was for Housman more an avocation than a vocation, and while the poems he worked over were always patches of what has been shown by other poets to be the wide range of verse, Housman succeeded beautifully in the poetry that counts most by his own estimate: passionate, lyrical verse, and phrases which, like “Runners whom renown outran,” are impossible either to ignore or to forget.

Source: Kristina Zarlengo, in an essay for Poetry for Students, Gale Group, 2000.

What Do I Read Next?

• Tom Stoppard, who wrote Shakespeare in Love — which became a multi-Oscar-winning film — also wrote a play about A. E. Housman. Called “The Invention of Love,” the play jokes about Housman’s notorious morbidity by envisioning the poet as a man who at last is truly dead, and glad of it. But in death, Housman is haunted by life, just as in life he was half in love with death, and he must confront his younger self as well as his memories of the man he long loved. This is a funny, passionate, excellent read.
• Lyric poet John Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” is another salute to triumph over death, in this case through reference to a piece of pottery, on which are painted human figures who are “For ever warm and still to be enjoyed / For ever panting and for ever young.” Keats himself was something of a tragic youth of the kind that Housman favored: he died at age twenty-six, having already established himself as a stupendous poet.
• Other of Housman’s poems deal with similar themes as does “To an Athlete Dying Young.” Of particular relevance are “1887,” comparable for its irony; “Bredon Hill,” which tells of another envied death of a young person; and “Twice a Week the Winter Through,” which also uses sport as a metaphor for life. The subjects of love, death, and the unkind transience of life are taken up in “This Time of Year a Twelvemonth Past,” “Along the Field As We Came By,” and “Is My Team Ploughing.”
• Now printed in essay form, “The Name and Nature of Poetry” is an affecting statement of poetics; Housman delivered it as a lecture late in his career. It enchanted many, and prompted T. S. Eliot to write his own essay in response to Housman’s call for a poetry that leaves explanation to prose writers and concerns itself instead with “transfusing” emotion from writer to reader.