A. E. Housman Quotes
Why, if 'tis dancing you would be, There's brisker pipes than poetry. Say, for what were hop-yards meant, Or why was Burton built on Trent? Oh many a peer of England brews Livelier liquor than the Muse, And malt does more than Milton can To justify God's ways to man. Ale, man, ale's the stuff to drink For fellows whom it hurts to think: Look into the pewter pot To see the world as the world's not.
Housman, A. E. A Shropshire Lad. Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1896, p. 91.
Ale has too often been praised by poets
The longer you drink the less sense your mind makes of things
Modern research has shown that the earliest deleterious effect of alcohol is impaired judgment and perception. It is fascinating that in this important set of advice from the chief God Odin, this was the problem that was focussed upon.
6th Baron Byron
The great poet was trying to get a job with the BBC and Nicholson was to be his boss.
The tavern was named after George Washington.
This has always been a problem for the US Military. Attempts at prohibition have been bad for morale, and there is a cultural tradition that military men drink alcohol. However in the Gulf War, our military men and women stationed in Saudi Arabia could not drink as a consequence of the Islamic prohibition of alcohol in Saudi Arabia. There has never been, in the history of our military a period with fewer courts martials, and discipline problems in general. Very few assaults, rapes and murders.
Samuel Langhorne Clemens, 1835-1910. The Congressmen who voted for Prohibition in the next century had not read or believed this quotation of Twain’s.
Alfred Edward Housman, usually known as A. E. Housman, was an English classical scholar and poet. His cycle of poems, A Shropshire Lad wistfully evoke the dooms and disappointments of youth in the English countryside. Their simplicity and distinctive imagery appealed strongly to Edwardian taste, and to many early 20th-century English composers both before and after the First World War. Through their song-settings, the poems became closely associated with that era, and with Shropshire itself.
