A Shropshire Lad has become one of the most beloved collections of poetry in the English language. The simple vocabulary, along with traditional rhyme and metre, make it an accessible read for many who would not otherwise pick up a volume of poetry, while the universal themes of lost love and mortality naturally held a broad appeal over time.
The Poet
Alfred Edward Housman was a classical scholar for whom poetry was an avocation. His translations of classical authors are well known, especially Horace's Ode 4.7 (Diffugere Nives). However, he maintaned there was no classical influence in his poetry. The rare times he spoke about his work, such as his presentation of his translation of Horace to his students, he was insistent that poetry was primarily concerned with emotions over intellect.
About the Poems
The poems in the volume all revolve around the same few themes, which offers both an insight into Housman's mental state and the reason for his sparse collection of work. The poems were written mostly around the time of his friend and former roommate Adalbert Jackson's death in 1892. At that time, Jackson's brother Moses, a college friend for whom Housman had a lifelong, unrequited love, was recently married and living in India. The poems themselves are very much about disappointed love and premature death, and they are pervaded by a sense of pessimistic disillusionment. When love occurs in the poems, it is unrequited or fickle.
Housman himself was not actually from Shropshire, and his depiction of the place is not necessarily accurate. He visited the area for the first time after he had written a substantial portion of the poems. The anonymity suggested by the title of the collection, and the strongly (but merely) imagined sense of place in the book, with many mentions of landmarks, therefore heightens the sense of exile, anonymity, and loneliness in the poems. Many of the poems are about soldiers leaving for war and not returning, and Housman refers to Shropshire as his "land of lost content."
A Shropshire Lad in Culture
Although Housman's decision to self-publish his collection of poems was a surprise at first to those who knew him. Initial sales were slow, but increased with Britain's involvement in the Second Boer War and then the First World War. It's believed that this was due to suitability of the emotion, themes and subject matter of the poetry to the times.
The poems also became better known between the wars when they inspired songs by several British composers. This trend continued and there are now hundreds of musical interpretations of Housman's work. It may be no surprise that his strongly thematic, emotional poetry inspired musicians, who work in the what could be considered the most abstract and directly emotional medium.
There are many references to A Shropshire Lad throughout literature and popular culture as well. Altough these are too many to count, anyone who can recall the first lines "Terence, this is stupid stuff," "With rue my heart is laden," "Loveliest of trees, the cherry now," or "Others, I am not the first" has heard poems from this collection. Wikipedia has a list of these at the bottom of the page for A. E. Housman.
Although Housman's poetry is distinctly sad, its simplicity, sense of longing, rhyme and metre also lend it a comforting, soothing quality. As the third stanza of poem LXII concludes:
’Tis true, the stuff I bring for sale
Is not so brisk a brew as ale:
Out of a stem that scored the hand
I wrung it in a weary land.
But take it: if the smack is sour,
The better for the embittered hour;
It should do good to heart and head
When your soul is in my soul’s stead;
And I will friend you, if I may,
In the dark and cloudy day.
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