A Study Guide (New Edition) for A. E. Housman's "To an Athlete Dying Young"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide (New Edition) for A. E. Housman's "To an Athlete Dying Young", 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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Jun 14, 2019
• ISBN: 9781535867993

Book preview

17

To an Athlete Dying Young

A. E. Housman

1896

Introduction

To an Athlete Dying Young, which commemorates the too-brief life of a victorious runner, was first published in 1896 as poem number XIX in A. E. Housman's debut collection, A Shropshire Lad. An Englishman, Housman was not himself athletically inclined, but a sporting friend whom he met in college, Moses Jackson, was a source of emotional inspiration to him. Jackson did not die young, but his younger brother Adalbert, also a close acquaintance of Housman's, died in his thirties, in 1892. This event, Tom Burns Haber suggests in his book A. E. Housman, may have helped to build up the feelings that overflowed into [Housman's] notebooks.

One might expect a poem more than a century old about an athletic young person's unfortunate death to bear little relation to modern reality, yet To an Athlete Dying Young touches on themes of the value of honor, the distortions of fame, and misplaced prioritization of the supreme athletic achievement: winning. To an Athlete Dying Young has been frequently anthologized and can be found in editions of Housman's collected poems.

Author Biography

Alfred Edward Housman was born at Valley House, in the town of Fockbury, on March 26, 1859. In his first year the family moved to nearby Bromsgrove, Worcestershire, England. His father was a conservative lawyer and, over time, a profligate drinker and financial liability to the family. During his youth, while a series of four brothers and two sisters were born after him, Housman was educated by his mother largely using readings from the Bible. In time, he became responsible for tutoring his growing siblings, and his intuitively constructivist approach saw them learning through elaborate games, writing their own poetry—the first assigned subject was Death—and even building their own telescope from a disassembled camera for lessons in astronomy. His literary inclinations were evident in his taking charge of the annual publication of a family magazine.

Housman entered the local school at eleven, winning a scholarship through his devotion to home studies. His personal world was greatly upset, however, when his mother, worn down from bearing children and surviving on too little money, and moreover