A Shropshire Lad
During his years in London, A. E. Housman completed his cycle of 63 poems,
A Shropshire Lad. After several publishers had turned it down, he published it at his own expense in 1896. The volume surprised both his colleagues and students. At first selling slowly, it rapidly became a lasting success, and its appeal to English musicians (see below) had helped to make it widely known before World War I, when its themes struck a powerful chord with English readers.
A Shropshire Lad has been in print continuously since May 1896.
The poems are pervaded by deep pessimism and preoccupation with death, without religious consolation. Housman wrote most of them while living in Highgate, London, before ever visiting that part of Shropshire (about thirty miles from his home), which he presented in an idealised pastoral light, as his 'land of lost content'. Housman himself acknowledged the influence of the songs of William Shakespeare, the Scottish Border Ballads and Heinrich Heine, but specifically denied any influence of Greek and Latin classics in his poetry.
Later collections
In the early 1920s, when Moses Jackson was dying in Canada, Housman wanted to assemble his best unpublished poems so that Jackson could read them before his death. These later poems, mostly written before 1910, show a greater variety of subject and form than those in
A Shropshire Lad but lack the consistency of his previously published work. He published them as
Last Poems (1922) because he felt his inspiration was exhausted and that he should not publish more in his lifetime. This proved true.
After his death Housman's brother, Laurence, published further poems which appeared in
More Poems (1936) and
Collected Poems (1939). Housman also wrote a parodic
Fragment of a Greek Tragedy, in English, and humorous poems published posthumously under the title
Unkind to Unicorns.
John Sparrow found statements in a letter written late in Housman's life which describe how his poems came into existence:
Poetry was for him ...'a morbid secretion', as the pearl is for the oyster. The desire, or the need, did not come upon him often, and it came usually when he was feeling ill or depressed; then whole lines and stanzas would present themselves to him without any effort, or any consciousness of composition on his part. Sometimes they wanted a little alteration, sometimes none; sometimes the lines needed in order to make a complete poem would come later, spontaneously or with 'a little coaxing'; sometimes he had to sit down and finish the poem with his head. That .... was a long and laborious process ...
Sparrow himself adds, "How difficult it is to achieve a satisfactory analysis may be judged by considering the last poem in
A Shropshire Lad. Of its four stanzas, Housman tells us that two were 'given' him ready made; one was coaxed forth from his subconsciousness an hour or two later; the remaining one took months of conscious composition. No one can tell for certain which was which."
De Amicitia (about friendship)
In 1942 Laurence Housman also deposited an essay entitled "A. E. Housman's 'De Amicitia'" in the British Library, with the proviso that it was not to be published for 25 years. The essay discussed A. E. Housman's homosexuality and his love for Jackson. Despite the conservative nature of the times, Housman, as distinct from the prudence of his public life, was quite open in his poetry, and especially his
A Shropshire Lad, about his deeper sympathies. Poem 30 of that sequence, for instance, speaks of how 'Fear contended with desire':
- ::Others, I am not the first
- ::have willed more mischief than they durst
In
More Poems, he buries his love for Moses Jackson in the very act of commemorating it, as his feelings of love break his friendship, and must be carried silently to the grave:
- ::Because I liked you better
- :::Than suits a man to say
- ::It irked you, and I promised
- :::To throw the thought away.
- ::To put the world between us
- :::We parted, stiff and dry;
- ::Goodbye, said you, forget me.
- :::I will, no fear, said I
- ::If here, where clover whitens
- :::The dead man's knoll, you pass,
- ::And no tall flower to meet you
- :::Starts in the trefoiled grass,
- ::Halt by the headstone naming
- :::The heart no longer stirred,
- ::And say the lad that loved you
- :::Was one that kept his word.
His poem, "Oh who is that young sinner with the handcuffs on his wrists?", written after the trial of Oscar Wilde, addressed more general social injustice towards homosexuality. In the poem the prisoner is suffering "for the colour of his hair", a natural, given attribute which, in a clearly coded reference to homosexuality, is reviled as "nameless and abominable" (recalling the legal phrase
peccatum horribile, inter christianos non nominandum, "the horrible sin, not to be named amongst Christians").