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A.E. Housman - Hero of the Hidden Life (Hardcover)
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A.E. Housman - Hero of the Hidden Life (Hardcover)
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A.E. Housman (1859-1936) was an English classical scholar and poet
who had an enormous influence on many British poets and musicians.
A.E. Housman (1859-1936) was both a celebrated poet and the
foremost classicist of his day. His poetry was set to music by
numerous composers including Arthur Somervell, Ralph Vaughan
Williams, George Butterworth, Ivor Gurney, John Ireland and Samuel
Barber. Housman's painstaking vocation, to restore classical
manuscripts by correcting textual errors, took up virtually the
whole of his working life. A seemingly inaccessible, aloof man, he
never set out tobe a professional poet, yet poetry poured out of
him and became his monument. His renowned A Shropshire Lad and Last
Poems were born of an inner crisis, sparked by a profound but
unreciprocated attachment fora fellow undergraduate. To be sexually
different in the time of Oscar Wilde was to invite ostracism and
disgust. This fact, allied with his secretiveness and penchant for
irony, reinforced his reticence on personal matters. Untilnow, he
has remained a hidden personality, held in the public mind as prim
and grim. This biography reveals by contrast a man of many facets,
one companionable in small groups, generous to a fault, and always
on the lookout for humour and fun; a master of English prose; a
witty and compelling after-dinner speaker; an occasional writer of
nonsense verse; a frequenter of the music hall; an intrepid early
traveller by air; and a connoisseur of food and wine. Drawing on
Housman's published letters and on 81 significant new finds, Edgar
Vincent conjures up a new Housman, created out of his reactions to
the events of his life as he experienced them. It weaves together
his scholarly life and the biographical elements in his poetry to
examine his emotional and sexual needs with dispassion and empathy
and to uncover his hidden sensibilities and creative world. EDGAR
VINCENT read English at St Catherine's College, Oxford. Following
Oxford he was commissioned in the Navy, spending most of his time
with the Royal Marines. Subsequently he worked for Imperial
Chemical Industries for thirty years. He then fulfilled a
life-longambition to write his book Nelson: Love & Fame,
published by Yale University Press in 2003. The book was
shortlisted for the BBC 4 Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction, was
a New York Times Notable Book and was named one ofAtlantic
Monthly's Books of the Year.
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