The Project Gutenberg EBook of A Shropshire Lad, by A. E. Housman

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Title: A Shropshire Lad

Author: A. E. Housman

Commentator: William Stanley Braithwaite

Release Date: May, 2004 [EBook #5720]
Posting Date: June 2, 2009

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A SHROPSHIRE LAD ***

Produced by Albert Imrie

A SHROPSHIRE LAD

By A. E. Housman

Introduction by William Stanley Braithwaite

1919

INTRODUCTION

The method of the poems in _ A Shropshire Lad _ illustrates better
than any theory how poetry may assume the attire of reality, and yet
in speech of the simplest, become in spirit the sheer quality of
loveliness. For, in these unobtrusive pages, there is nothing shunned
which makes the spectacle of life parade its dark and painful, its
ironic and cynical burdens, as well as those images with happy and
exquisite aspects. With a broader and deeper background of experience
and environment, which by some divine special privilege belongs to
the poetic imagination, it is easier to set apart and contrast these
opposing words and sympathies in a poet; but here we find them evoked
in a restricted locale- an English county-where the rich, cool tranquil
landscape gives a solid texture to the human show. What, I think,
impresses one, thrills, like ecstatic, half-smothered strains of music,
floating from unperceived instruments, in Mr. Housman's poems, is
the encounter his spirit constantly endures with life. It is, this
encounter, what you feel in the Greeks, and as in the Greeks, it is a
spiritual waging of miraculous forces. There is, too, in Mr. Housman's
poems, the singularly Grecian Quality of a clean and fragrant mental and
emotional temper, vibrating equally whether the theme dealt with is
ruin or defeat, or some great tragic crisis of spirit, or with moods and
ardours of pure enjoyment and simplicities of feeling. Scarcely has any
modern book of poems shown so sure a touch of genius in this respect:
the magic, in a continuous glow saturating the substance of every
picture and motive with its own peculiar essence.

What has been called the "cynical bitterness" of Mr. Housma