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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