A. E. Housman, English poet and scholar (born 1859)

Alfred Edward Housman was an English classical scholar and poet. He showed early promise as a student at the University of Oxford, but he failed his final examination in literae humaniores and took employment as a patent examiner in London in 1882. In his spare time he engaged in textual criticism of classical Greek and Latin texts, and his publications as an independent researcher earned him a high academic reputation and appointment as professor of Latin at University College London in 1892. In 1911 he became the Kennedy Professor of Latin at the University of Cambridge. Today he is regarded as one of the foremost classicists of his age and one of the greatest classical scholars of any time. His editions of Juvenal, Manilius, and Lucan are still considered authoritative.