Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    A Study Guide for A.E. Housman's "The Loveliest of Trees"
    A Study Guide for A.E. Housman's "The Loveliest of Trees"
    A Study Guide for A.E. Housman's "The Loveliest of Trees"
    Ebook36 pages42 minutes

    A Study Guide for A.E. Housman's "The Loveliest of Trees"

    By Gale and Cengage

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for A.E. Housman's "The Loveliest of Trees," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateSep 28, 2016
    ISBN9781535838122
    A Study Guide for A.E. Housman's "The Loveliest of Trees"

    Read more from Gale

    Related to A Study Guide for A.E. Housman's "The Loveliest of Trees"

    Related ebooks

    Teaching Methods & Materials For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      A Poet for the Age of Brexit

      Sep 12, 2017

      A Poet for the Age of Brexit
      6 min read

    • Article

      A Shropshire Lad

      Nov 9, 2022

      A Shropshire Lad
      3 min read

    • Article

      When the Beasts Spoke: Thoreau and the Sound of America

      Aug 21, 2017

      One of the pleasures of Walls’s Thoreau is seeing how Thoreau’s stubborn refusal to lead an ordinary life turned a bright, but otherwise rather ordinary young man into a great and original artist. The post When the Beasts Spoke: Thoreau and the Soun

      7 min read

    • Article

      Books

      Oct 4, 2022

      Books
      3 min read

    • Article

      Songs of Farewell Hubert Parry

      May 13, 2021

      Hubert Parry’s six choral Songs of Farewell were first performed as a complete set on 23 February 1919, in the chapel of Exeter College, Oxford. The occasion was a memorial service for the composer, an alumnus of the college, who had died less than s

      3 min read

    • Article

      Where The Wych Elm Grows

      Jun 24, 2020

      A SMALL boy stood beside a large, overhanging tree in a Hertfordshire garden in the 1880s. According to folklore, if pigs’ teeth were found in a tree’s trunk, chewing a small piece of its bark could cure toothache. This wych elm, with its few embedde

      4 min read

    • Article

      On Memory and Literature

      Jun 30, 2021

      Now we're all possessors of personal supercomputers that can instantly connect us to whole libraries — there can seem little sense to make iambs and trochees part of one's soul. The post On Memory and Literature appeared first on The Millions.

      18 min read

    • Article

      The Literary Lives of Mid-Century Nuns

      May 8, 2023

      It's time we understand why the nuns of this era were drawn to writing and publishing poetry. The post The Literary Lives of Mid-Century Nuns appeared first on The Millions.

      5 min read

    • Article

      ‘And For That Minute A Blackbird Sang’

      Jul 28, 2021

      WHEN the poet Edward Thomas was leaving his home at Steep in Hampshire permanently in 1916, to go to war, he wrote of his love of the Shoulder of Mutton Hill in the nearby Ashford Hangers. In When First, he recalled the first time he had seen the hil

      4 min read

    • Article

      True Romantic

      Apr 2, 2020

      True Romantic
      3 min read

    • Article

      'Fryderyk Chopin' Already Qualifies As One Of The Best Biographies Of The Year

      Oct 18, 2018

      English-Canadian musicologist and university professor Alan Walker spent 10 years doing extensive research into vast archives of primary source material on Chopin, allowing him to produce this MRI-thorough biography.

      6 min read

    • Article

      The Late Bloomer

      Sep 1, 2023

      “An eccentric woman deserves an eccentric biography.” So writes Willard Spiegelman in this first biography of the poet Amy Clampitt. If there was anything eccentric about the genteel bohemian Amy Clampitt, it was that she was extremely private about

      5 min read

    • Article

      Forever England

      May 5, 2021

      Forever England
      5 min read

    • Article

      Fishing As Breathing

      Apr 20, 2022

      Fishing As Breathing
      5 min read

    • Article

      Psychedelic Survival

      Jan 5, 2022

      A Girl’s Life In The Incredible String Band Rose Simpson Strange Attractor Press 2021 Pb, 264pp, £17.50, ISBN 9781907222672 The Incredible String Band’s short career, 1966-1971, saw the release of eight albums and a unique performance legacy. Combini

      8 min read

    • Article

      Love’s Labour’s Found

      Dec 6, 2020

      From late summer 1592 until the end of the following year, the plague was rife in London, and to stop packed crowds from spreading infection, theatres were closed. William Shakespeare, who had just begun to make a name for himself as a playwright, tu

      7 min read

    • Article

      Poet W.S. Merwin Followed Where The Words Led

      Mar 18, 2019

      Once called ‘the Thoreau of our era,’ W.S. Merwin was an environmentalist who transformed concrete language into evanescent poetry that reflected on war, spirituality, and the natural and metaphysical worlds.

      2 min read

    • Article

      The Blue-collar Bard

      Jul 13, 2020

      The Blue-collar Bard
      13 min read

    • Article

      For The Islands He WROTE

      Aug 20, 2021

      For The Islands He WROTE
      4 min read

    • Article

      Poetry In Commotion

      Jun 30, 2021

      Compare the Duchess of Sussex with Anne Boleyn. Both married into the Royal Family and were imprisoned: Anne in the Tower of London awaiting execution; Meghan, like the rest of us, during the pandemic. Both, too, turned to poetry. Anne wrote the haun

      3 min read

    • Article

      Book Review

      Jun 17, 2023

      Book Review
      3 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for A Study Guide for A.E. Housman's "The Loveliest of Trees"

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      A Study Guide for A.E. Housman's "The Loveliest of Trees" - Gale

      12

      Loveliest of Trees, the Cherry Now

      A. E. Housman

      1896

      Introduction

      Alfred Edward Housman's A Shropshire Lad precisely caught the mood of England at the end of the Victorian age. The poem cycle combines a nearly sentimentalized view of youth with a nearly sentimentalized view of death. The second poem in A Shropshire Lad, Loveliest of Trees, the Cherry Now, eloquently expresses the brevity of human life and its fragility compared to the beauty of the natural world. Through a complex tapestry of allusion, the poem calls on the reader to experience that beauty before it is too late, and the chance is missed in death. That call is all the more poignant because the circumstances of Housman's life made it impossible to experience the happiness he desired. Behind his back, Housman was sometimes called a maiden aunt, that is, someone who failed in meeting society's expectations, eschewing the personal satisfaction of making a relationship and substituting service to a more extended family. There is an undeniable kernel of truth in the accusation. Housman compensated for any failure in his private life by throwing himself into his work as a professor, becoming one of the most important classical scholars of modern times. A Shropshire Lad is one of the most beloved collections of English poetry.

      Author Biography

      Housman was born on March 26, 1859, in Fockbury, Worcestershire, England. His father was a solicitor (a lawyer). His younger brother Laurence also became a poet and acted as Housman's literary executor. Housman attended Bromsgrove, an English public school, part of the aristocratic educational system that produced the British Empire's intellectual and cultural elite. While at school, Housman won prizes for his poetry, including his The Death of Socrates. He won a scholarship to St. John's college, Oxford. By chance he became the roommate of Moses Jackson, a popular athlete who rowed for Oxford and went on to a career as a secondary educator in various parts of the British Empire. Housman fell in love with Jackson, a love that formed the emotional ground of Housman's whole life. Jackson, however, had

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1