SOURCE: Hoagwood, Terence Allan. “Classical Skepticism in the Poetry of A. E. Housman.” Housman Society Journal 14 (1988): 19-28.

In the following essay, Hoagwood examines the influence of classical skepticism on the philosophical outlook of Housman's poetry.

A. E. Housman's poems are so impressively anchored in the emotional and physical life, so colloquial in style and so evidently simple in subject, that a philosophical reading of these poems may at first glance seem paradoxical or impertinent. Beyond the evidence of the poems, Housman's remarks sometimes openly deprecate formal philosophy: ‘Plato's doctrine of Forms or Universals is useless as a way of explaining things—it is up to Science to show what is the reality of the world’.¹ With apparent justice, John Wain observes that ‘philosophy was alien ground to him’.² As Richard Perceval Graves has suggested, however, Housman was indeed able to understand philosophical problems; ‘the point was, that he...