A Shropshire lad (1896) is one of the most celebrated collections of poems in English. Housman brings together themes of evanescent youth, beautiful English rural scenery, and untimely sudden death, hitting many of the same buttons as the German romantic poets of a hundred years earlier, and he does it in a deceptively simple, almost folkloric style that draws the reader straight into the world of the poems. The generally morbid subject-matter is lightened by an occasional touch of earthy humour, even self-mockery. In the penultimate poem, "Terence, this is stupid stuff", the poet debates with a friend the relative merits of poetry and beer:

Oh, many a peer of England brews
Livelier liquor than the Muse

- the poet concedes the point, but argues that poetry is better at preparing you for life's miseries than beer is!

When you read these poems for the first time, you'll probably be surprised how many of their lines and phrases have entered the language. They are not poems of the sort you have to struggle through on the page, untangling dense webs of allusions, but rather poems that you want to learn by heart, to read aloud, to sing (all the great and good of 20th century English music have had a go at them at various times...).

Many of the poems refer to the countryside of the Shropshire hills. It's an area where I used to go walking "when I was one-and-twenty" myself: when you stand on the Long Mynd or the Wrekin, at that age, it's difficult to resist the urge to declaim a bit of Housman. The poems seem to fit perfectly to the landscape, but famously, Housman didn't know that area at all well when he wrote the poems: he was a Worcestershire lad himself, and the poems were mostly written in London. He seems to have picked Shropshire because he liked the rhythm of the placenames and thought it would fit with the romantic pastoral idea of Englishness he was trying to convey. Maybe "Worcestershire" is too firmly attached to "Lea and Perrins" in the popular imagination...

Housman has become something of a gay icon, of course, and (as the title implies) the subjects of these poems are mostly somewhat idealised young men, usually farm-workers and soldiers. Women appear only peripherally, as mothers or sweethearts. Quite a few of the poems are addressed by one young man to another, often from the grave, but they deal (explicitly, at least) with friendship, rather than love, between men. Obviously, these are poems that resonate with gay readers, but I think just about anyone would get a good deal of pleasure from them.

[Another of those books with lots of copies on LT that no-one has bothered to review so far, presumably because it is so well-known] ( )