A Shropshire Lad

By A. E. Housman

A Shropshire Lad is a collection of sixty-three poems by the English poet Alfred Edward Housman. Some of the better-known poems in the book are "To an Athlete Dying Young", "Loveliest of Trees, the Cherry Now", "The Lent Lily" and "When I Was One-and-Twenty".
The collection was published in 1896. Housman originally titled the book The Poems of Terence Hearsay, referring to a character there, but changed the title at the suggestion of his publisher.

A Shropshire Lad was first published in 1896 at Housman's own expense after several publishers had turned it down. His colleagues and students were surprised by the emotional depth and vulnerability it revealed in an apparently distant and self-contained man. At first the book sold slowly, but during the Second Boer War (1899–1902), Housman's nostalgic description of rural life and young men's early deaths struck a chord with English readers and the book became a best-seller. Its popularity increased during World War I. Arthur Somervell and other composers were inspired by the folksong-like simplicity of the poems, and the most famous musical settings are by George Butterworth (Six Songs from A Shropshire Lad and Bredon Hill and Other Songs) and Ralph Vaughan Williams (On Wenlock Edge), with others by Ivor Gurney, John Ireland and Ernest John Moeran.

Housman was surprised by the success of A Shropshire Lad, thinking that its deep pessimism and obsession with death, without the consolations of religion, would not appeal to a Victorian audience. The poems are set in a half-imaginary pastoral Shropshire, "the land of lost content", and Housman wrote most of them before visiting the county. He described the transience of love and youth in simple, unadorned language that many critics of the time thought old-fashioned. Housman himself acknowledged the influence of the songs of William Shakespeare, the Scottish Border ballads and Heinrich Heine, but specifically denied any influence of Greek and Latin classics in his poetry.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Classic Poetry
• Release date: Mar 1, 2018
• ISBN: 9788826002972

A. E. Housman

Alfred Edward Housman (1859-1936) was born and brought up in the Bromsgrove region of Worcestershire, adjacent to Shropshire, and was educated locally and at St John's College, Oxford. Though he was a fine scholar, he failed to gin an Honours degree, and spent some years in the Patent Office in London. A series of brilliant academic articles secured him the Professorship of Latin at London University and he went on the become Kennedy Professor of Latin at Cambridge and a Fellow of Trinity College. Most famous for A Shropshire Lad (1896), Last Poems was published in 1922, More Poems appeared posthumously and Collected Poems in 1939.

Book preview

A SHROPSHIRE LAD

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A. E. Housman

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

A SHROPSHIRE LAD

I.

II.

III.

IV.

V.

VI.

VII.

VIII.

IX.

X.

XI.

XII.

XIII.

XIV.

XV.

XVI.

XVII.

XVIII.

XIX.

XX.

XXI.

XXII.

XXIII.

XXIV.

XXV.

XXVI.

XXVII.

XXVIII.

XXIX.

XXX.

XXXI.

XXXII.

XXXIII.

XXXIV.

XXXV.

XXXVI.

XXXVII.

XXXVIII.

XXXIX.

XL.

XLI.

XLII.

XLIII.

XLIV.

XLV.

XLVI.

XLVII.

XLVIII.

XLIX.

L.

LI.

LII.

LIII.

LIV.

LV.

LVI.

LVII.

LVIII.

LIX.

LX.

LXI.

LXII.

LXIII.

INTRODUCTION

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THE METHOD OF THE POEMS in A Shropshire Lad illustrates better than any theory how poetry may assume the attire of reality, and yet in speech of the simplest, become in spirit the sheer quality of loveliness. For, in these unobtrusive pages, there is nothing shunned which makes the spectacle of life parade its dark and painful, its ironic and cynical burdens, as well as those images with happy and exquisite aspects. With a broader and deeper background of experience and environment, which by some divine special privilege belongs to the poetic imagination, it is easier to set apart and contrast these opposing words and sympathies in a poet; but here we find them evoked in a restricted locale- an English county-where the rich, cool tranquil landscape gives a solid texture to the human show. What, I think, impresses one, thrills, like ecstatic, half-smothered strains of music, floating from unperceived instruments, in Mr. Housman’s poems, is the encounter his spirit constantly endures with life. It is, this encounter, what you feel in the Greeks, and as in the Greeks, it is a spiritual waging of miraculous forces. There is, too, in Mr. Housman’s poems, the singularly Grecian Quality of a clean and fragrant mental and emotional temper, vibrating equally whether the theme dealt with is ruin or defeat, or some great tragic crisis of spirit, or with moods and ardours of pure enjoyment and simplicities of feeling. Scarcely has any modern book of poems shown so sure a touch of genius in this respect: the magic, in a continuous glow saturating the substance of every picture and motive with its own peculiar essence.

What has been called the cynical bitterness of Mr. Housman’s poems, is really nothing more than his