Lately unfashionable: AE Housman
A poet of simple forms and straightforward language ... AE Housman. Photograph: EO Hoppe/Corbis
Radio 4's recent series of Great Lives came to an end with a typically nuanced and insightful examination by Matthew Parris and Colin Dexter of the life of AE Housman. Touching on a number of issues, such as Housman's classical scholarship, repressed homosexuality and of course his poetry, Dexter and Parris nevertheless didn't address the issue of why Housman seems to have fallen out of fashion so badly in the past few years.
Admittedly, his life doesn't appear to have been a great one. After failing his first degree at Oxford in mysterious circumstances, he became a clerk at the Patent Office before becoming a classical scholar at the age of 33, eventually becoming Professor of Latin at Cambridge in 1911. His classical scholarship - erudite and witheringly dismissive of his rivals - still has its followers, but it is his poetry that reached a far wider audience, beginning with his 1895 collection A Shropshire Lad, a title laced with an irony that probably escaped most of its first readers: Housman had never set foot in the county before writing it.
After his death in 1936, a posthumous collection, More Poems, was published that alternated between more reveries on the beauties of nature and personal reflections on his unrequited love for his Oxford friend Moses Jackson. Some of this writing, such as XXXI's "Because I liked you better / Than suits a man to say" is still amazingly suggestive sexually, such as the observation that the two men should part "stiff and dry". It comes as little surprise that Auden wrote a poem about him shortly after his death, saying how he "kept tears like dirty postcards in a drawer", and described how, in his "savage footnotes on unjust editions / He timidly attacked the life he led".
Housman's reputation burgeoned in the 20th century, partly because of the support of writers such as Kingsley Amis and Betjeman, and partly because in the poetry of Larkin (who described him as "the poet of unhappiness"), there were clear echoes of Housman's wry, wistful reflections on a bygone England that probably never had existed in the first place. Seventy years after his death, Tom Stoppard's masterly and underrated play The Invention Of Love sought to compare the repressed existence of Housman with the fin-de-siècle of Wilde and the Aesthetic movement, giving Housman a sympathetic hearing as a passionate, brilliant man unable to break out against the strictures of society.
This century, Housman's reputation seems to have plummeted. There has been no major biography of him, perhaps on account of the dullness of his life, nor any serious reevaluation of the poetry. He was unfortunate in that he was neither a flashy aesthete nor a daring modernist, producing old-fashioned verse that used simple forms and unflashy language to evoke time, place and mood with consummate skill. Perhaps surprisingly, it was Alan Hollinghurst who has been his most public advocate of late, writing a well-considered and moving foreword to a recent collection, which made a cogent argument for why Housman should be considered first and foremost a queer writer. In his work, with its subtle themes of disguise, ever-shifting personae and, of course, "the love that dare not speak its name", Housman now seems to be closer to his decadent and modernist peers than before. Perhaps Stoppard's comparisons with that great dissembler Wilde are more apt than ever.