A. E Housman Research Paper

A.E. Housman's tumultuous childhood and unfilled voluptuous desires played a significant role in his pessimistic poetry. He was born in Fockbury, England where he shared a home with eight other members of his family including six younger siblings. His mother was an intensely religious woman, and with her death on his twelfth birthday, he rapidly descended into a naturalistic worldview, eventually coming to atheism. He attended Oxford at a green seventeen years old. Newly manifest homosexual tendencies were manifest in the form of love for his heterosexual roommate Moses Jackson. These desires so filled his mind that he failed his final exams, barely passing his final year at school. After completion of his studies, he went on to work in the London Patent Office for more than a decade, but eventually took post as director of Latin studies at the University of London. Even though Housman failed to develop a relationship with Jackson, he does not stop pursuing him. Moses Jackson worked at the same Patent office Jackson gained employ for over a year, but eventually moved on, leaving Housman alone (Academy of American Poets). …show more content…
He had been entirely confident that his life’s work would consist correcting miscopies and redacting misinformation copied by scribes, instilling a mindset of faux semi-omniscience, which collapsed, leaving him devastated at the failure of his final examinations. The feelings he had for Moses Jackson went unsatisfied, and he lived the whole of his remaining life in a self-proclaimed state of “unfulfillable loneliness” (Sullivan). His work as a scholarly critic is not as renowned as his poetry, although he devoted many years of his life to this work (Poetry Foundation