A Shropshire Lad: With a Chapter from Twenty-Four Portraits by William Rothenstein

By A. E. Housman and William Rothenstein

First published in 1896, “A Shropshire Lad” contains sixty-three poems which quickly became popular—particularly among young readers—when first published. Alfred Edward Housman (1859–1936), also known as A. E. Housman, was an English poet and classical scholar considered to be one of the greatest scholars to have ever lived. He is most famous for this collection of lyrical poems which evoke the travails and disappointments of English youth in the countryside. A fantastic collection of classic countryside poetry that will appeal to fans and collectors of Housman's wonderful work. Contents include: “From Clee To Heaven The Beacon Burns”, “Loveliest Of Trees, The Cherry Now”, “Leave Your Home Behind, Lad”, “Wake: The Silver Dusk Returning”, “Oh See How Thick The Goldcup Flowers”, “When The Lad For Longing Sighs”, “When Smoke Stood Up From Ludlow”, etc. This classic work is being republished now in a new edition with specially curated introductory material.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Read Books Ltd.
• Release date: May 26, 2020
• ISBN: 9781528789776

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. E. HOUSMAN

A CHAPTER FROM

Twenty-Four Portraits

BY WILLIAM ROTHENSTEIN

A. E. Housman is a poet in the English tradition. Calling his solitary book of lyrics A Shropshire Lad, he takes the reader back to a time when poetry was not merely or mainly metropolitan and each country knew creative pride. He uses the simplest English forms, writing new ballads that wear grimness of old; and he uses the simplest English themes, turning to days when the ploughman naturally loved a scarlet coat and, breaking the laws, was hanged for it without philosophically reviling the laws. His briefest verses have uncommon energy; they are a man's poetry and quicken the hearts of common men. It is poetry which moves in the changeful waters of our time like a swimmer conscious of his strength and careless of all else. The best of the lyrics -few are below the best -have each his athletic power, a masculine curtness and full pride of life.

There is something else, something which only individual genius can impress upon the traditional forms and expand them with a more than mortal beauty. He looks at a man dying young:

And round that early laurelled head

Will flock to gaze the strenghless dead,

And find unwithered on its curls

The garland briefer than a girl's.

And here too he speaks with fresh ease in the classic manner of English lyrical poets:

Bring, in this timeless grave to throw,

No cypress, sombre on the snow;

Snap not from the bitter yew

His leaves that live December through;

Break no rosemary, bright with rime

And sparkling to the cruel clime

It is at once old and new, familiar and vivid.

That so small a book should present so sharp a figure in an atmosphere so clear, is the last tribute to A. E. Housman. The figure of A Shropshire Lad is one whose chief energy is action rather than thought; one for whom life holds change, passion, glory, shame; one who will easily avoid the gravest failure -failure to live intensely. Looking at the figure, as he emerges from these sixty-three lyrics and stands salient before you, the full proof of A. E. Housman's genius is seen in this, that he has created that figure neither larger nor smaller than life.

INTRODUCTION

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