"A. E. Housman" by William Rothenstein

A. E. Housman

William Rothenstein

Pencil on paper

Photographically “reproduced by Mr. Emery Walker” (Preface)

Material on A. E. Housman in the Victorian Web

See below for text accompanying this portrait.

Image capture, color correction, and text by George P. Landow

[You may use this image without prior permission for any scholarly or educational purpose as long as you (1) credit the Internet Archive and University of Toronto and (2) link your document to this URL in a web document or cite the Victorian Web in a print one. ]

[Rothenstein does does not identify which of the “various hands” wrote the commentary below that accompanies his portrait drawing.]

A.E. Housman is a poet in the English tradition. Calling his solitary book of lyrics A Shropshire Lad, he takes the reader back to a time when poetry was not merely or mainly metropolitan and each county knew creative pride. He uses the simplest English forms, writing new ballads that wear the grimness of the old; and he uses the simplest English themes, turning to days when the ploughman naturally loved a scarlet coat and, breaking the laws, was hanged for it without philo- sophically reviling the laws. His briefest verses have uncommon en- ergy; they are a man's poetry and quicken the hearts of common men. It is a poetry which moves in the changeful waters of our time like a swimmer conscious of his strength and careless of all else. The best of the lyrics few are below the best have each this athletic power, a masculine curtness and full pride of life.

There is something else, something which only individual genius can impress upon the traditional forms and expand them with a more than mortal beauty. He looks at a man dying young:

And round that early laurelled head
Will flock to gaze the strengthless dead,
And find unwithered on its curls
The garland briefer than a girl's.

And here too he speaks with fresh ease in the classic manner of English lyrical poets:

Bring, in this timeless grave to throw,
       No cypress, sombre on the snow;
Snap not from the bitter yew
       His leaves that live December through;
Break no rosemary, bright with rime
       And sparkling to the cruel clime.

It is at once old and new, familiar and vivid.

That so small a book should present so sharp a figure in an atmos- phere so clear, is the last tribute to A. E. Housman. The figure of A Shropshire Lad is one whose chief energy is action rather than thought; one for whom life holds change, passion, glory, shame; one who will easily avoid the gravest failure failure to live intensely. Looking at the figure, as he emerges from these sixty-three lyrics and stands salient before you, the full proof of A. E. Housman's genius is seen in this, that he has created that figure neither larger nor smaller than life.

References

Rothenstein, William. Twenty-four Portraits with critical appreciations by various hands. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1920. Internet Archive version of a copy at the University of Toronto. Web. 20 November 2012.

Last modified 20 November 2012