page_title: A. E. Housman
section_title: Commemorations
hierarchical_section_title: A. E. Housman / Commemorations
caption_attribution_description: English: Refurbished statue of the poet A. E. Housman in Bromsgrove's main street, Sept 2015
context_page_description: Alfred Edward Housman, usually known as A. E. Housman, was an English classical scholar and poet, best known to the general public for his cycle of poems A Shropshire Lad. Lyrical and almost epigrammatic in form, the poems wistfully evoke the dooms and disappointments of youth in the English countryside. Their beauty, simplicity and distinctive imagery appealed strongly to Edwardian taste, and to many early 20th-century English composers both before and after the First World War. Through their song-settings, the poems became closely associated with that era, and with Shropshire itself.
  Housman was one of the foremost classicists of his age and has been ranked as one of the greatest scholars who ever lived. He established his reputation publishing as a private scholar and, on the strength and quality of his work, was appointed Professor of Latin at University College London and then at the University of Cambridge. His editions of Juvenal, Manilius and Lucan are still considered authoritative.
context_section_description: The earliest commemoration of Housman was in the chapel of Trinity College in Cambridge, where there is a memorial brass on the south wall. The Latin inscription was composed by his colleague there, A. S. F. Gow, who was also the author of a biographical and bibliographical sketch published immediately following his death. Translated into English, the memorial reads:
  This inscription commemorates Alfred Edward Housman, who was for twenty-five years Kennedy Professor of Latin and Fellow of the College.  Following in Bentley's footsteps he corrected the transmitted text of the Latin poets with so keen an intelligence and so ample a stock of learning, and chastised the sloth of editors so sharply and wittily, that he takes his place as the virtual second founder of textual studies.  He was also a poet whose slim volumes of verse assured him of a secure place on the British Helicon.  He died on 30th April 1936 at the age of seventy-six.
  From 1947, University College London's academic common room was dedicated to his memory as the Housman Room. Blue plaques followed later elsewhere, the first being on Byron Cottage in Highgate in 1969, recording the fact that A Shropshire Lad was written there. More followed on his Worcestershire birthplace, his homes and school in Bromsgrove. The latter were encouraged by the Housman Society, which was founded in the town in 1973. Another initiative was the statue in Bromsgrove High Street, showing the poet striding with walking stick in hand. The work of local sculptor Kenneth Potts, it was unveiled on 22 March 1985.
  The blue plaques in Worcestershire were set up on the centenary of A Shropshire Lad in 1996. In September of the same year a memorial window lozenge was dedicated at Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey The following year saw the première of Tom Stoppard's play The Invention of Love, whose subject is the relationship between Housman and Moses Jackson.
  As the 150th anniversary of his birth approached, London University inaugurated its Housman lectures on classical subjects in 2005, initially given every second year then annually after 2011. The anniversary itself in 2009 saw the publication of a new edition of A Shropshire Lad, including pictures from across Shropshire taken by local photographer Gareth Thomas. Among other events, there were performances of Vaughan Williams' On Wenlock Edge and Gurney's Ludlow and Teme at St Laurence's Church in Ludlow.
caption: Housman statue in Bromsgrove
exif: {"Image Make": "Sony", "Image Model": "ST26i", "Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image XResolution": "72", "Image YResolution": "72", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image YCbCrPositioning": "Centered", "Image ExifOffset": "142", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "468", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "3548", "EXIF ISOSpeedRatings": "0", "EXIF ExifVersion": "0220", "EXIF DateTimeOriginal": "2015:09:09 19:43:30", "EXIF DateTimeDigitized": "2015:09:09 19:43:30", "EXIF ComponentsConfiguration": "YCbCr", "EXIF Flash": "Flash did not fire", "EXIF FocalLength": "23/20", "EXIF FlashPixVersion": "0100", "EXIF ColorSpace": "sRGB", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "264", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "356", "Interoperability InteroperabilityIndex": "R98", "Interoperability InteroperabilityVersion": "[48, 49, 48, 48]", "EXIF InteroperabilityOffset": "340"}