![]() ![]() “He is a strange phenomenon,” Ted Hughes said of Housman, “but to my mind the most perfect expression of something deeply English and a whole mood of English history.” Some of Emily Dickinson’s brief lyrics come closest-tonally, and in their mastery of the short, compressed line-but she has never quite attained Housman’s popularity, and the landscape she wrote about, the one inside her own head, could hardly be said to have created a sense of national identity. ![]() We don’t have anything remotely like it in American lit. Somehow, these sixty-three short lyrics, celebrating youth, loss, and early death, became for generations of readers the perfect evocation not merely of what it feels like to be adolescent and a little emotional but of what it means to be English. But the real source of his fame is a single small volume of poetry, “A Shropshire Lad,” which has never been out of print since it was published, in 1896. ![]() Housman was so shy and furtive that Max Beerbohm once compared him to “an absconding cashier.” For such a crabbed and elusive figure, though, he continues to draw a surprising amount of attention: books, articles, musical tributes, even a Broadway play, Tom Stoppard’s “The Invention of Love.” Academics know him the way he is mostly depicted in that play-as a formidable classicist, probably the greatest of his generation. Readers have long found in “A Shropshire Lad” what they wanted to find. ![]()
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