A Shropshire Lad

A Shropshire Lad is a collection of 63 poems by the English poet A. E. Housman, published in 1896. Most of the poems were written in 1895, while Housman was living at Byron Cottage in Highgate, though many had been composed earlier. A classical scholar by training, Housman published the book partly at his own expense, after another publisher had already rejected it. The title has a history of its own: Housman is said to have first considered calling it The Poems of Terence Hearsay, after a character who partly speaks through the verses, but a colleague at the British Museum suggested the change. A friend later remembered things differently, insisting that A Shropshire Lad had always been Housman's choice.

Sales were slow at first. The initial printing of 500 copies, some 160 of them sent to the United States, did not sell out until 1898. Demand picked up during the Second Boer War (1899–1902), partly because of its military themes and its preoccupation with dying young. Its popularity grew further during the First World War, when it went with many young men into the trenches. Housman also helped make it accessible: he initially declined royalties in order to keep the price low, and he encouraged small, cheap editions, including pocket and even waistcoat-pocket versions. By 1911 it was selling around 13,500 copies a year, and by its fiftieth anniversary there had been close to a hundred editions in the UK and the US.

The poems imagine a rural landscape that is largely a literary invention. Housman was born in Worcestershire rather than Shropshire, and he admitted later that his famous "blue remembered hills" were mostly a construction, though he drew on a regional guidebook for some details. The verses mourn the transience of love, idealism and youth, through a voice that is plain, musical and often deceptively simple. Housman drew on folk ballads, Shakespeare's songs and Heine, and he deliberately avoided ornament, though some critics have read the resulting simplicity as a sign of emotional immaturity.

The collection is not a connected narrative. Different voices speak in different poems, some poems take the form of dialogue, and some speakers are ghosts addressing the living. It opens with a tribute to Shropshire lads who died as soldiers in the service of the Queen Empress, and it moves through war, suicide, execution, friendship, exile in London and death as a journey into eternal night. Its influence was considerable. Composers set many of the poems to music within a few years of publication, and generations of readers, including W. H. Auden's and George Orwell's contemporaries at Eton, learned them almost as devotional texts. Its wide reach also made it a frequent target for parodists, a sign of how thoroughly its manner had become recognisable.