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A. E. Housman is renowned as the scholar–poet who in his lifetime published two slim volumes of verse – A Shropshire Lad (1896) 1 and Last Poems (1922) 2 – a much larger volume of classical papers, and an edition of Manilius‘ Astronomica that remains the definitive Latin text to this day. Although Housman had little sympathy with Manilius‘s stoical beliefs about the operation of divine reason in the universe, both the poems and the Astronomica share the sense of human beings playing out their lives in a cosmos where stronger impersonal forces are at work. Since Astronomica is an extended astrological text, this is, of course, to be expected; in the poems, the cosmological and astronomical references are more subtly exploited and are derived from other classical authors, such as Lucretius, and Housman‘s own extensive knowledge of astronomy. Nevertheless, an awareness of such sources and references remains crucial for a fuller understanding of Housman‘s poetic achievement. The purpose of this article then is twofold. Firstly, and by way of setting a context for the second part, I seek to show briefly how Housman‘s poetry can be read as part of a more general struggle (shared by writers such as Tennyson, Browning, Hardy, Swinburne and Meredith) that took place in Housman‘s lifetime to confront the implications of advances in evolutionary theory, cosmology, and astrophysics, and to formulate a wider synthesis that integrated the objective facts of science with the subjective reality of human experience. Secondly, and primarily, I aim to show how an understanding of specific traditions in classical philosophy, and Housman‘s own expertise in spherical astronomy (itself a necessary adjunct to his classical scholarship), considered in the context of Housman‘s own worldview and his personal life, illuminates the reading of Housman‘s verse. The reconsideration of man‘s place in nature was a process that acquired a particular urgency in the second half of the nineteenth century. As Pamela Gossin observes in her similarly-intentioned treatment of the work of Thomas Hardy: Victorian Culture was uniquely situated to integrate its knowledge of astronomical and cosmological history – ancient to near modern – with its own emergent and every more urgent attempts to understand and explain humanity‘s place in the cosmos. (58)

‘“Star-Defeated Sighs”: Classical Cosmology and Astronomy in the Poetry of A. E. Housman’