A Shropshire Lad

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Title: A Shropshire Lad
Author: A. E. Housman
Release Date: May, 2004 [EBook #5720]
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0. START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A
SHROPSHIRE LAD ***
This etext was prepared by Albert Imrie, Colorado, USA
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
localean 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.
Housman's
poems, is really nothing more than his ability
to etch in sharp tones
the actualities of experience. The
poet himself is never cynical; his
joyousness is all too
apparent in the very manner and intensity of
expression.
The "lads" of Ludlow are so human to him, the hawthorn
and
broom on the Severn shores are so fragrant with associations, he
cannot help but compose under a kind of imaginative
wizardry of
exultation, even when the immediate subject is
grim or grotesque. In
many of these brief, tense poems the reader confronts a mask, as it were,
with appalling and
distorted lineaments; but behind it the poet smiles,
perhaps sardonically, but smiles nevertheless. In the real countenance
there are no tears or grievances, but a quizzical,
humorous expression
which shows, when one has torn the
subterfuge away, that here is a
spirit whom life may menace with its contradictions and fatalities, but
never dupe with its circumstance and mystery.
All this quite points to, and partly explains, the charm
of the poems in
_ A Shropshire Lad _. The fastidious care with which each poem is
built out of the simplest of technical
elements, the precise tone and
color of language employed
to articulate impulse and mood, and the
reproduction of
objective substances for a clear visualization of
character and scene, all tend by a sure and unfaltering composition,
to
present a lyric art unique in English poetry of the last twenty-five years.
I dare say I have scarcely touched upon the secret of
Mr. Housman's
book. For some it may radiate from the
Shropshire life he so finely
etches; for others, in the vivid artistic simplicity and unity of values,
through which
Shropshire lads and landscapes are presented. It must
be,
however, in the miraculous fusing of the two. Whatever that
secret is, the charm of it never fails after all these years to keep the