Last Name 1 Name Day Month 2011 AP British Literature Teachers Name A.E.

Housmans To an Athlete Dying Young Many people make their lifes goal to achieve some sort of fame, whether through performances or creations in the arts, discoveries in the sciences, or achievements in the field of athletics and competition. While very few manage to achieve this, even fewer manage to achieve recognition for this during their lifetimes, and for those arguably lucky few, another dilemma arises. Success places a person into an entirely unpredictable situation, one that can go awry in often disastrous ways, which generally invalidate the persons past actions. The 19th Century, Classical British poet A.E. Housman, in one of his more deceptively simple works, To an Athlete Dying Young proposes the argument that it is better to quit while you are ahead, an opinion which, according to current societal evidence I am forced to agree with. A. E. Housman presents his argument through the tale of an athlete, whom he believes to have been fortunate enough to die at his peak, leaving behind only a record of his greatest achievements. Athleticism is a strong choice for Housman to introduce his argument because this is one of the few fields of expertise where it is recommended that it participants retire before they begin to decline. This is especially true in running, where age is a dominant factor in the amount of exertion a runners body can handle, and teams are not able to pick up the slack of their failing members. In other sports, the athletes choice to retire is usually in anticipation of their physical decline, and their hope to be remembered by their greatest achievements, as opposed to their most recent. This memory paradox is seen throughout our lives, commonly

Last Name 2 through hypocritical eulogies. People shower praise, not unduly, upon deceased persons who during their lifetimes were continually harassed by their critics. For example, most recently the infamous case of Joseph Paterno, who shortly after being awarded, the title of Winningest Coach in Division 1 History, got caught up in the Sandusky scandal of Penn State. During this momentary fall from grace, he was dismissed from his position, and died tragically of lung cancer. Suddenly his accused complicity with child abuse disappears as waves of fans mourn him and revel in his past achievements. Although Housmans argument may seem cowardly, or counter-intuitive, instead of telling the reader to fear fame he warns them that regardless of how much of it you accumulate, it will always be temporal. In the fifth stanza of To an Athlete Dying Young Housman makes a reference to the lads that wore their honors out, the ones whom he believed to have outlived their own names. In context of the entire stanza it would seem as though his argument purports that death will make your achievements eternal, but the brief garland of the final stanza implies that the fame, regardless will wear away, and eventually be forgotten. While this may seem to be to antithesis to Housmans argument, he is actually strengthening it by addressing its fundamental weakness. Houseman is aware that eventually a persons achievements will be forgotten or replaced, but he wants to make it clear that while the person is alive it is their own fault, not their detractors or successors for their descent into infamy. Housman is actually suggesting that it is better to die than to have the burden of fame, calling the runner smart for leaving the fields where glory does not stay. Albert Einstein, the creator of the Theory of Relativity, became famous for his advances in the field of physics, which due to even more recent advances in science are now under scrutiny. Had Einstein been alive to see this day, not only would his works be heavily criticized, but his character as well. People would wonder how he did not realize, with a mind as

Last Name 3 brilliant as his own how his fallacious his own theories were, and many would believe that his ignorance was intentional, in an effort to keep the fame that he previously achieved. According to this poem, Housman would agree that this failure was a result of Einsteins inability to handle the burden of his status, and that he could have avoided the backlash of this inevitable failure by dying beforehand. Housman, through his poem, implies that out of the few people that manage to achieve fame an incredibly small amount of people will manage to survive it gracefully. While he places the much of the responsibility on the famous themselves, there are other things that should be considered, including the circumstances and nature of their achievements. There are many achievements that will never be equaled or surpassed, very few of them in the field of athletics, which Housman obviously avoided. However his point remains irrefutable and the argument of fame as a burden is truer than ever. Thoughout his writing, Housman as a whole seems withdrawn, possibly shy and averse to idea fame itself. Despite this bias his argument is still solid, and while exploring different ideas comes to the same conclusion as his predecessor Emily Dickinson, that fame is a fickle food, and men who eat of it should much rather die.