Housman Country

On a beautiful June day in 1951 a young army cadet called Julian Hurd took a gun from his parents’ house near Marlborough in Wiltshire, walked into a nearby wood, and shot himself dead. Finding the empty gun case, and their son’s commonplace book lying open on his desk at a page where he had written some lines from Sophocles, his parents feared the worst and went in search of him. They found him in the wood, ‘down in the most beautiful corner – stretched out with the filtering sunlight playing over him’. He was just nineteen and the family had spent the previous day driving around the local countryside, stopping from time to time to take walks and look out over the Vale of Pewsey. ‘Quite exhausted by so much loveliness J and I both slept on the way home,’ his mother had written in her diary.

This sudden, violent death was a mystery. Julian was not much enjoying the rough and tumble of National Service, but had recently been enrolled at the Cadet School in Aldershot and had a place waiting for him at Cambridge University. He seemed, his older brother thought, ‘in good form’. Unlike that other nineteen-year-old army cadet who shot himself in 1895, there was no evidence that Julian was experiencing any romantic or sexual troubles. His mother decided that the contrast between army life and the day he had just spent soaking up the beauty of the English landscape had simply proved too much for him: ‘Julian died from what might be called an overdose of beauty after having been starved of it for so long.’

The family nevertheless looked for other clues to the tragedy. The quotation Julian had left on his desk was taken from Antigone, in which the play’s protagonist, under threat of death, justifies her decision to defy Creon’s order that her brother’s body should lie unburied on the battlefield: ‘That I must die some time I knew, edict or no edict, and if I am to die before my time that I count a gain. When one lives as I do in the midst of a sorrow surely one were better dead.’ Julian’s own sorrows may have been related to an unspoken feeling that the army was training him to kill, and that he was at heart a conscientious objector, but there was no specific evidence for this theory. For his brother Douglas, the future Conservative politician and writer, there was ‘one other literary clue. During the short time he was at Aldershot Julian bought the Collected Poems of A.E. Housman, the green hardback edition published by Jonathan Cape. I have it in front of me; it is in excellent condition. Interleaved is a mauve eightpenny bus ticket issued at Aldershot on 28 May 1951. I suppose that Julian bought the book on that day and read it when he came home for the last time the following weekend. Housman’s repeated messages of despair addressed to young men in language of powerful, carefully contrived simplicity fitted exactly Julian’s mood.’

Douglas Hurd concluded that the immediate cause of his brother’s decision to end his life was the one his mother had identified. ‘The damage was done by the immediate contrast between the beauty and loving kindness of a weekend spent at home and the ugly misery of army life to which he had to return that Sunday night. This contrast played on the strong emotions of a romantic nineteen-year-old keyed up by a sentimental education. Deep down in Julian’s nature must have been a strain of sadness which suddenly overpowered him.’

Julian Hurd was one of those troubled young men whom Housman imagined reading his poems in some distant future. The melancholy of the poems that had so particularly appealed to young men in the early years of the twentieth century remained potent, but it also continued to have a much wider appeal. A century after that generation marched away to their battlefronts, Housman remains a pervasive presence in what we read, watch and listen to. The assertion by Edmund Wilson in 1938 that the poems of A Shropshire Lad ‘went on vibrating for decades’ is borne out by the book’s continuing longevity. It is not so much that it has remained in print and been read generation after generation, but that its vibrations have persisted in the collective mind. As Ted Hughes put it: ‘His poems have entered the national consciousness, or perhaps one should say national subconsciousness, with a deeper kind of familiarity and subjective intimacy, more unforgettably, than even, say, Hardy’s poems.’

In ‘Tell me not here, it needs not saying’, Housman used the word ‘aftermaths’ in its original, agricultural sense. Aftermaths were the new growth that appeared in fields after they had been mown or harvested, and it seems an appropriate word to use for the many different manifestations of Housman’s continuing presence in our culture some eighty years after his death.

Housman’s first volume of poems seemed fresh and forward-looking when it appeared in 1896, but his second was published the same year as The Waste Land. As the tides of Modernism washed around him, Housman remained firm upon his little rock, and as they receded he came to be valued as a representative of an older but still vital tradition. It was a tradition particularly appreciated by such poets as Siegfried Sassoon and Edmund Blunden, who in both their life and their work felt a deep attachment to England and its landscape, and to a world that had been swept away by the war that made their literary reputations. When in 1940 F.R. Leavis declared Eliot ‘the greatest living English poet’, Blunden protested that ‘my feeling is that to this day T.S.E. is an American and his verse is not part of our natural production’. Sassoon agreed, replying that whatever the merits of Eliot’s poetry, it was ‘not the same thing that comes from essentially English feeling. A Herefordshire apple is itself, and so is a Burgundy vine. We write our lines out of our bones, and out of the soil our forefathers cultivated. Let Eliot write out of his New England ancestry.’ Over a decade later, the two poets placed Housman alongside Thomas Hardy, Robert Bridges and Walter de la Mare as the leading twentieth-century figures in what Sassoon called ‘the authentic procession of English poetry’.

Writers of a later generation agreed. ‘I consider A.E. Housman a great English poet, one of our greatest since Matthew Arnold,’ Kingsley Amis wrote in the TLS in 1991. ‘In my compilation The Amis Anthology (1988) I included thirteen of his poems, a total not surpassed by any other poet in the book.’ (Amis in fact slips a fourteenth poem into the anthology’s notes, where Housman’s ‘R.S.L.’ appears in the commentary on Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘Requiem’.) For Amis, Housman had ‘nothing to do with the great modernist development in poetry’, a development more or less ignored in his anthology, but belonged instead to the ‘older, home-grown tradition of Matthew Arnold, Hardy, Edward Thomas and, in poems like “First Sight” and “Cut Grass”, Philip Larkin’. Larkin shared Amis’s respect for this tradition and his 1973 edition of The Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century English Verse attracted considerable controversy for what was felt to be its anti-Modernist selection: Hardy was represented by twenty-seven poems, Kipling by thirteen, Betjeman by twelve, Graves by eleven, Edward Thomas by nine, and de la Mare and Housman by eight each (which was one more than Eliot).

Looking forwards rather than backwards, Louis MacNeice had written in 1938 that ‘Housman has left no followers.’ In the strictest sense of the term, he was probably right. ‘Housman is easy to parody and hard to imitate,’ noted John Carey in Pure Pleasure (2000), in which Housman’s Collected Poems was one of fifty books he selected to represent twentieth-century literature. Housman nevertheless left his mark on other writers – not least on MacNeice himself. Like many of his generation, MacNeice was introduced to A Shropshire Lad at school, and a short list of his principal characteristics drawn up by a close friend in the 1960s included ‘Housman by heart’. In the 1940s he was delighted to be living for a while in Byron Cottage, where Housman had written most of his first book, and his 1949 radio play The Queen of Air and Darkness was both inspired by and took its title from ‘Her strong enchantments failing’. His friend and collaborator W.H. Auden disagreed about followers and felt, rather, that Housman provided a good model for the young poet: ‘Art for him will be something infinitely precious, pessimistic and hostile to life. If it speaks of love, it must be love frustrated, for all success seems to him noisy and vulgar; if it moralizes, it must counsel a stoic resignation, for the world he knows is well content with itself and will not change.’ Auden had spent his own apprentice years reading and learning from older poets, and among his earliest poems, written at school and university, are several that are both modelled upon and echo Housman. A poem such as ‘Envoi’, for example, is almost entirely made up of lines and phrases more or less lifted from Housman. It begins ‘Take up your load and go, lad / And leave your friends behind’, and its verse form, prosody and vocabulary – sin, dust, bearing sorrows, dark roads, broken vows – are all Housman’s. As Auden later admitted, verses written early in a poet’s career are often ‘made up of magical phrases that seem to have risen involuntarily to the consciousness’.

Although Housman’s influence upon Auden’s poetry was comparatively short-lived – the discovery of T.S. Eliot in the summer of 1926 changed everything – Auden returned to this early literary godfather not only in several essays but also in the well-known but biographically contentious poem ‘A.E. Housman’, written in December 1938. As late as 1971 Auden would open his poem ‘A Shock’ with the declaration: ‘Housman was perfectly right. / Our world rapidly worsens’. This observation was prompted by Auden’s reading of Housman’s letters, in his review of which he quoted and glossed Housman’s claim to be a pejorist, and the poem goes on to recall a childhood in ‘leafy dells’, echoing the cuckoo in ‘Tell me not here, it needs not saying’, which ‘shouts all day at nothing / In leafy dells alone’.

Of the same generation as Auden, John Betjeman was a poet whose work achieved a similar popularity to Housman’s among general readers. He ‘learned most of A Shropshire Lad and Last Poems by heart’ while at school with MacNeice, and, as a result, Housman had a great influence on his ‘ear and eye’. Betjeman’s own poetry came to represent a distinctive kind of Englishness; less complex than Housman’s, and more concerned with buildings and cities than with landscape, it was nevertheless replete with place-names and the occasional note of suppressed homoeroticism, and was written with an acute awareness of time passing, youth fading, and death lying in wait. Betjeman nods specifically to Housman by giving the title ‘A Shropshire Lad’ to a poem he wrote about Captain Matthew Webb, a Salopian (born in Dawley) who in 1875 became the first man to swim the English Channel. When asked to define the role of the poet, Betjeman’s answer was one Housman himself might have given: ‘I think primarily it’s to say things simply, shortly, rhythmically, memorably. And if it’s true that my poetry’s read by a lot of people who don’t ordinarily read poetry, that’s all I could want to happen.’

Place-names and a different, more primal sense of England are a feature of Geoffrey Hill’s poetry. Hill seems an unlikely debtor to Housman, but the two poets share a childhood with deep roots in the soil of Worcestershire. Hill was born some two miles north of Housman’s birthplace, and he was educated in Bromsgrove. With a nod to ‘To an Athlete Dying Young’, he has acknowledged Housman as a ‘fellow townsman’ both in an interview and in the title poem of his 2006 collection Without Title, in which Housman is held up as a model for the expression of grief. Housman’s Collected Poems and Oliver Hill’s Little Treasury of Modern Poetry (1946) were the two books that introduced Hill to modern poetry at the age of fifteen, when they were bought for him by his father. Hill’s childhood may have taken place some seventy years after Housman’s, and in very different social circumstances, but the view west from Bromsgrove had not changed. ‘Before I knew anything at all about the psychology of Housman, I knew what his “Shropshire” meant to him at an intuitive level,’ he has said in an interview, ‘because the Shropshire Hills were the western horizon of the village landscape of my childhood. If you stood at the top of the field opposite our house you looked right across the Severn Valley to the Clee Hills and the Welsh hills very faint and far off behind them, and this was the landscape of Housman’s own childhood.’ As in Housman’s, place-names in Hill’s poetry evoke a lost past – Shrawley, Burcot, Romsley, Waseley, Walton, Lickey, Ipsley, Hurcott – and Hill made his own selection of his ‘local’ poems to publish alongside those of Housman and Molly Holden in Three Bromsgrove Poets (2003).

Housman surfaces most intriguingly in the poem ‘A Cloud in Aquila’, published in Hill’s 2007 collection A Treatise of Civil Power. The subject of the poem is Alan Turing, the brilliant mathematician, computer scientist and wartime codebreaker, who fell foul of ‘the laws of God, the laws of man’ when he was prosecuted for homosexuality in 1952 and subsequently committed suicide. It would hardly be surprising if Turing’s fate did not bring Housman to mind, but there were further links between the two men. While at his public school Turing met Christopher Morcom, who became his best friend and first love – a love that was undeclared and unreciprocated. Morcom was another lad who would never be old, dying suddenly in his teens from bovine tuberculosis. The two schoolboys shared Housman’s interest in astronomy, and Morcom’s death caused Turing to think about the separation of mind and body, which in turn led the way to his most significant work, on computing and artificial intelligence, rather as Housman’s memories of his friendship with Moses Jackson had led to the writing of A Shropshire Lad. As Hill put it elsewhere: ‘Morcom was Turing’s muse.’ Not only that: Morcom lived at ‘The Clock House’, otherwise Fockbury House, where Housman had spent his teens. Hill’s poem ends with the reflection that Turing too is now dead and the Clock House demolished, but that the nearby road still leads to ‘Housman’s Pisgah’.

One of Philip Larkin’s poems that Amis singled out as belonging to the older, home-grown tradition, ‘Cut Grass’ was written in 1971 and consists of three four-line stanzas. In subject as well as form it is recognisably set in Housman Country, with its allusions to the death-haunted natural cycle of blooming and fading, while its image of June hedgerows seemingly strewn with snow appears to be borrowed from ‘’Tis time, I think, by Wenlock town’. If this is a rare example of Larkin deliberately following Housman, the two poets nevertheless had a good deal in common both in their personalities and their writing. As Wendy Cope has noted, Clive James’s observation that Larkin ‘faces the worst on our behalf, and brings it to order’ might equally apply to Housman. Introducing himself to the novelist Barbara Pym, Larkin wrote: ‘I have a great shrinking from publicity – think of me as A.E. Housman without the talent, or the scholarship, or the soft job, or the curious private life.’ Both poets belong to the long tradition of English melancholia, which is often mistaken for mere gloom, and it was with a certain amount of fellow-feeling that Larkin’s review of Richard Perceval Graves’s 1979 biography of Housman was titled ‘All Right When You Knew Him’. More accurately, Larkin described Housman as ‘the poet of unhappiness’, adding: ‘no one else has reiterated his single message so plangently.’ The two poets hold a similar place in the English imagination and inspire the same kind of affection among readers.

One of the more remarkable and unobtrusive ways in which Housman’s poems have entered the culture is that a large number of authors have borrowed lines and phrases from them for the titles of their books. In 1967 it was estimated that more titles had been taken from the collected poems of A.E. Housman than any other source apart from the Bible and Shakespeare, and if the gap between second and third place remains large, a vast number of additional Housman-derived titles have appeared in the almost fifty years since then. Edmund Wilson suggested that one reason authors light upon Housman when searching for book titles is that they ‘assume that his poems are so well known that it is almost like quoting Shakespeare’. Among renowned writers working in a wide range of genres who, in search of a striking title, have reached for their copies of Housman’s poems are James T. Farrell (A World I Never Made, 1936, and No Star Is Lost, 1938), Nevil Shute (The Far Country, 1952), Patrick White (The Tree of Man, 1955), Ursula K. Le Guin (The Wind’s Twelve Corners, 1976) and James Ellroy (Blood’s a Rover, 2009). While it seems natural that an account of Ludlow in the First World War should go to ‘The Recruit’ for the title Till Ludlow Tower Shall Fall, other books that have nothing to do with Housman’s poems nevertheless bear titles derived from them. Some of these, such as Brooks Too Broad for Leaping, With One Coin for Fee and The Sky Suspended, could only have come from Housman. Others, such as Drums of Morning, The Careless People and End of Roaming, might have been chosen without particular reference to his poems, but in almost every case the borrowing is acknowledged and the poem from which it is taken is reproduced in part or in full, either in the text or as an epigraph.

‘Into my heart an air that kills’ appears to have provided more titles than any other Housman poem, not only because it contains striking phrases that have become very well known, but also because its references to an irrecoverable past have provided writers with a kind of emotional shorthand. When Dennis Potter called his 1979 television play about childhood Blue Remembered Hills, he expected viewers both to recognise the reference and appreciate its irony. Far from depicting childhood as a land of lost content, the play echoes William Golding’s Lord of the Flies in emphasising the innate barbarity and cruelty of children (all of whom are played by adult actors), and it ends with the most vulnerable and unhappy of them being burned to death in a barn while the author himself intones Housman’s poem in voice-over. The same poem is similarly read in the coda to Nicolas Roeg’s 1971 film Walkabout, in which a woman recalls a scene of primal innocence when, some years earlier, she and her little brother, lost at the time in the Australian outback, swam naked in a waterhole with the Aboriginal boy who had saved them before killing himself. That Housman’s poem has travelled a long way from Shropshire or Highgate is also suggested when it is quoted (but not identified) in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun (2006). An English writer in Nigeria during the civil war in the 1960s thinks about his parents’ house in Wentnor, a Shropshire village just to the west of The Long Mynd, and recalls his father reading this poem, which has further resonance in the novel because the secessionist Republic of Biafra lasted only two and a half years before being reintegrated into Nigeria. For the Igbo people who had fought for independence, Biafra became a lost homeland that ‘will not come again’.

Like Housman’s Shropshire, the magical kingdom of Gramarye in T.H. White’s great Arthurian novel, The Once and Future King (1939–58), is a far (and partly imaginary) country that stands for all England. The revised second volume of this quartet was titled The Queen of Air and Darkness and took as its epigraph the final stanza of ‘The Welsh Marches’ (XXVIII), a poem of unusual violence that seems to have haunted White, probably because he felt some of his own troubles related back to his being the child of ill-matched and viciously warring parents. During his revisions, White wrote to a friend that the character of Morgause in the novel ‘is now pure melodramatic WITCH (rather fun) who goes about boiling black cats alive and so forth. Housman wrote a poem about her. (Her strong enchantments failing, Her towers of fear in wreck, Her limbecks dried of poison, etc.)’. The character of Lancelot, first introduced as a fifteen-year-old smitten with Arthur, also owes something to Housman: ‘The boy thought there was something wrong with him. All through his life – even when he was a great man with the world at his feet – he was to feel this gap: something at the bottom of his heart of which he was aware and ashamed, but which he did not understand. There is no need for us to try to understand it. We do not have to dabble in a place which he preferred to keep secret.’

Rather more unexpectedly, Housman’s poetry is at the centre of Alice Munro’s story ‘Wenlock Edge’ (2005), in which a young woman in Canada is persuaded to remove all her clothes in order to read aloud A Shropshire Lad to an older man, while in Kingsley Amis’s One Fat Englishman (1963), the protagonist attempts to ward off orgasm by repeatedly reciting to himself ‘The weeping Pleiads wester’. Allusions to Housman and his poetry in fiction more often turn up in a homosexual context, however. A distinct Shropshire Lad atmosphere pervades the journals of the cult English writer Denton Welch, in which he records bicycling around the Kentish countryside in the 1940s, watching lads stripping off to bathe in rivers and reflecting upon their likely fate in the war. The editor of these journals, Jocelyn Brooke, devoted most of his own writing to an attempt to capture a land of lost content, and both his semi-autobiographical novel, The Orchid Trilogy (1948–50), and the botanical volume The Flower in Season (1952, its title taken from ‘Ho, everyone that thirsteth’) are replete with references to Housman.

Mary Renault’s pioneering homosexual novel The Charioteer (1953) also alludes to Housman in an appropriately covert way. Wounded at Dunkirk, Laurie Odell is torn between his love for a naval officer called Ralph and a conscientious objector called Andrew. Lying in bed during an air raid, he worries whether the two men are safe, while attempting to reassure a small boy in the next bed, who is recovering from a burst appendix. Laurie recalls (inaccurately) lines from ‘The chestnut casts his flambeaux, and the flowers’, which he feels he might have recited to the boy had he been a few years older – ‘But he looked a little fragile, yet, to shoulder the sky; and, besides, he had fallen asleep’. The source of these lines remains unidentified, but Renault was counting on her readers to recognise them – not least because, along with Plato’s Phaedrus (from which the novel derives its title), Housman’s poetry would be part of the supportive intellectual equipment a sensitive young homosexual such as Laurie would be likely to carry around with him.

This is the kind of literature that the playwright Alan Bennett sought out as a shy, bookish, homosexual, working-class teenager in Leeds in the early 1950s: ‘I study as if they are code books the works of writers I have been told are homosexual, though of course they cannot at this time openly admit it. Most satisfactorily, though, there is A.E. Housman, whose affections are unspoken (or spoken of as unspoken), which is what mine always are, and who regards love as a doomed enterprise right from the start. Of his life and the object of his affections I know nothing, but as I roam the streets of Headingley in 1950 I feel he is the one I might tell it to, though what the “it” was I would have been hard put to say.’ This is a strikingly similar reaction to that of the young E.M. Forster some forty years before.

Housman was one of the poets Bennett selected for a television series, Poetry in Motion, broadcast by Channel 4 in 1990. This was a ‘personal anthology’ of Six Poets: Hardy to Larkin (the title under which the accompanying book was republished in 2014), the other three being Betjeman, Auden and MacNeice. The poems Bennett chose were ‘all in differing degrees accessible’ and expressed a distinctive kind of Englishness, often manifesting itself in ‘that very English fault: an overdose of irony’. Irony is certainly characteristic of Bennett himself, whose 1968 play Forty Years On is a kind of cavalcade of Englishness, at once critical and affectionate, performed as a play at a public school called Albion House. Bennett described his play (which contains references to Housman) as ‘an elegy for the passing of a traditional England’, and admitted that his ‘heart was very much in [the headmaster’s] final speech in which he bids farewell to Albion House and this old England. And yet the world we lost wasn’t one in which I would have been happy, though I look back on it and read about it with affection.’ There is a distinct note of A Shropshire Lad in these remarks, which (Bennett notes) were written on the fiftieth anniversary of the Armistice.

Housman’s dictum that ‘All knowledge is precious whether or not it serves the slightest human use’ is quoted by a popular (and homosexual) teacher in Bennett’s later school play, The History Boys (2004), the principal theme of which is similar to that of Housman’s Introductory Lecture of 1892 about the purpose of learning and education. Housman himself steps onto the stage in Tom Stoppard’s The Invention of Love (1997), in which he is played by two different actors, one representing him as an old man, the other as an Oxford undergraduate. This provides the same double perspective that gives A Shropshire Lad much of its emotional power, youthful hope in dialogue with rueful maturity – literally so in the play, in which the two Housmans have extended conversations with each other about poetry, love and the Classics.

But perhaps the perfect example of the way in which Housman’s poetry has been absorbed and refracted by a writer of a later generation is J.L. Carr’s novel A Month in the Country (1980). Housman’s were the poems Carr ‘loved best’, the poems he took with him to the Second World War. He subsequently became headmaster of Highfields Primary School in Kettering, Northamptonshire, and every year he would march all 200 of his pupils through a local housing estate when spring blossom was on the trees, leading them in a mass recitation of ‘Loveliest of trees, the cherry now’, a poem some of them still had by heart forty years later. A Month in the Country is amongst other things a beautifully wrought study of England and Englishness. Although set in the North Riding of Yorkshire, it was written at least in part in Housman Country: the words ‘Stocken, Presteigne / September, 1978’ are printed on its last page, referring to the place in the Welsh Marches where Carr had lived in a caravan while working on one of the series of illustrated county maps he published. The novel is narrated by Tom Birkin, who in old age recalls the summer of 1920, when, as a shell-shocked young veteran of the First World War who has been deserted by his wife, he spends several recuperative weeks uncovering a medieval wall painting in an isolated church.

The novel suggests Housman in its brevity, its lyricism, and its mood of nostalgia and regret. The second stanza of ‘From far, from eve and morning’ (XXXII) is used as one of its epigraphs, and is more or less paraphrased in the crucial central scene in which Birkin fails to make his feelings known to the young wife of the local vicar, with whom he has fallen in love. ‘That was the missed moment. I should have put out a hand and taken her arm and said “Here I am. Ask me. Now. The real question! Tell me. While I’m here. Ask me before it is too late.”’ Both Housman and Elgar, and their place in the English landscape of the Clee Hills and the Malverns, are imagined at the novel’s close, and the final paragraph carries a similar charge to that of A Shropshire Lad: ‘We can ask and ask but we can’t have again what once seemed ours for ever – the way things looked, that church alone in the fields, a bed on a belfry floor, a remembered voice, the touch of a hand, a loved face. They’ve gone and you can only wait for the pain to pass.’

It is not just in literary fiction that Housman’s presence is felt. As early as 1930 a knowledge of Housman’s poetry helps Lord Peter Wimsey solve the murder case at the centre of Dorothy L. Sayers’ Strong Poison (1930). The particular poem (‘Terence, this is stupid stuff’) is not mentioned by name, presumably because Sayers imagined her readers to be as literate as Wimsey’s butler, for whom the mere presence of A Shropshire Lad in his employer’s library is clue enough.

A more recent fictional detective who knows his Housman is Inspector Morse, who first appeared in Colin Dexter’s Last Bus to Woodstock in 1975 and solved cases in twelve further novels over the following twenty-four years. Although these books were best-sellers, it was when The Dead of Jericho (1981) was adapted for television in 1987, inaugurating a series of thirty-three two-hour episodes broadcast over thirteen years, that Morse became arguably the most popular fictional English detective of all time. Morse’s love of Wagner is a constant feature of both the books and the television series, but his love of Housman is equally marked. Dexter suggests an equivalence for Morse between the two men in The Wench Is Dead (1989), at the beginning of which the detective experiences a spell in hospital in the same ward as a character who dies. ‘Had Morse known how the man could never abide a chord of Wagner, he would have felt much aggrieved,’ Dexter writes; ‘yet had he known how the Colonel had committed to memory virtually the whole of Housman’s poetic corpus, he would have been profoundly gratified.’ The Life of Richard Wagner and Selected Prose of A.E. Housman are among the ‘small pile of books’ on Morse’s bedside table in the second of the novels, Last Seen Wearing (1976), the latter informing the inspector about the dilemma he finds himself in during his investigation into the disappearance of a schoolgirl. Housman is referred to in several of the other novels, most notably in The Remorseful Day (1999), which takes its title from ‘How clear, how lovely bright’. Although the novel contains several mentions of Housman, the title is intended to suggest the dying Morse’s feelings about past mistakes, omissions, deceptions and things badly done, and it evokes the general mood of the book rather than anything more specific. In the television adaptation by Stephen Churchett, however, Morse recites the last verse of Housman’s poem as he watches a spectacular sunset.

Dexter, who bought a copy of the first edition of Housman’s Collected Poems while reading Classics at Cambridge in 1950 and claims since then to have ‘collected everything written by Housman and about Housman’, sometimes relies upon his readers having an equal knowledge of the poet and his work. In Death Is Now My Neighbour (1996), for instance, Morse recalls that he had kept the photograph of a young woman he had loved and lost ‘pressed between pages 88–89 of his Collected Poems of A.E. Housman’. The reader needs to know which edition of the book Morse owns, because in the standard edition available in 1996 the ‘Epithalamium’ Housman wrote for Moses Jackson appears on those pages, but in the first edition (the one Morse is more likely to own) it would be ‘The True Lover’. Even more obscure are the lines ‘Dry the azured skylit water / Sky my everlasting tent’, which appear in a poem received by the police purporting to provide information about the location of a body in The Way Through the Woods (1992). The poem is attributed to ‘A. Austin (1853–87)’, which as the novel’s more literary readers will recognise from the dates cannot be the man who was Poet Laureate when A Shropshire Lad was published. They might also, if they really know their Housman, recognise that the poem has not merely appropriated two lines from ‘In my own shire, if I was sad’ (XLI) – ‘And like a skylit water stood / The bluebells in the azured wood’ – but has additionally cannibalised the cancelled quatrain from ‘He looked at me with eyes I thought’. This is not merely a rarefied literary in-joke; it also provides a clue to the identity of the person who wrote the mysterious poem.

After the Inspector Morse television series came to an end, the detective’s sidekick Sergeant Lewis returned with his own series, and both Lewis and Endeavour (a ‘prequel’ set in the 1960s when Morse was embarking on his career in the police force) have continued to honour Housman. While Lewis still struggles with cultural references, his new sergeant, James Hathaway, is almost as well read as Morse was. In Dead of Winter (2010), a childhood friend who is being obliged to marry someone she doesn’t love in order to save her family’s finances is discovered looking up ‘Into my heart an air that kills’, a poem that Hathaway naturally knows by heart. The same poem is read when the ashes of a murder victim are scattered in a non-religious ceremony in Down Among the Fearful (2003), while the pilot episode of Endeavour (2012) involves an investigation into the death of a fifteen-year-old girl, during which the fact that she has a volume of Housman’s poems among other first editions on her bedside table provides a clue.

The presence of Housman in these globally successful television series shows how far the poet has penetrated popular culture. Another sure sign that one has become part of the mainstream is to feature in The Simpsons, a cartoon series distinguished by its knowing references to both high and low culture. In an episode from 1998 titled ‘The Last Temptation of Krust’ (itself a nod to a Martin Scorsese film), Bart persuades his favourite comedian, Krusty the Clown, to appear at a comedy festival. Krusty’s dated and offensive material is so fiercely criticised that the clown announces his retirement and quotes ‘To an Athlete Dying Young’ in his farewell speech. Housman’s poetry is also read or recited in such mainstream Hollywood films as Titanic (1953) and Out of Africa (1985), while John Irvine’s film adaptation of Frederick Forsyth’s The Dogs of War (1980), in which a group of soldiers are hired to stage a coup in a West African country, has Geoffrey Burgon’s setting of ‘Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries’ sung over its end titles. Housman even features in The Twilight Zone, which originally ran on American television between 1959 and 1964, in a much-loved episode titled ‘The Changing of the Guard’ (1962). A disillusioned teacher at a boys’ high school gives a class on Housman and is later saved from suicide when visited by the grateful ghosts of former pupils. Housman has also been saluted on the radio by the BBC’s hugely popular agricultural soap opera The Archers, which has been running since 1951 and is set in the fictional West Midlands county of Borsetshire. Bert Fry is a retired farm worker and part-time gardener who also fancies himself as a poet, and in an episode broadcast in January 2014, he asks one of his employers for some washing-up liquid: ‘“Loveliest of trees, the cherry now…” I’m going to clean the dirt and the algae off. I always thinks of Housman when I looks at it. In fact it’s sparked off a few lines of me own if you’d care to hear them.’ People, on the whole, would rather not hear Bert’s poetry, which is written in a style closer to that of William McGonagall than Housman; undaunted by this lack of enthusiasm, Bert has long been planning to publish a volume of his verses which he intends to call A Borsetshire Boy.

One way of judging the continuing appeal of Housman among the young is to look at YouTube, where he has a surprisingly strong presence. If not currently on the British school curriculum, Housman’s poems are certainly being studied at schools in America and other parts of the world as far away from Shropshire as South Korea. Many of the videos posted on YouTube are class assignments in which students ‘interpret’ Housman’s poems, usually in the form of a recital of an individual poem, sometimes accompanied by a dramatic or animated presentation. Other YouTube postings seem to be unrelated to school work, or are at any rate persuasively extra-curricular: a young black man with dreadlocks recites ‘When I was one-and-twenty’ while standing in a back yard; a young Chinese-American, beneath his bedclothes, sings unaccompanied what appears to be his own rather beautiful setting of ‘Loveliest of trees, the cherry now’; four students from the Universitas Slamet Riyadi in Java, two of them in hijabs, sing the words of ‘The Olive’ translated into their own language.

The poems that appear most frequently on YouTube are ‘When I was one-and-twenty’, ‘Loveliest of trees, the cherry now’ and ‘To an Athlete Dying Young’. The last of these is often used to commemorate classmates or sportsmen who have died prematurely – or, by stretching a point, celebrities such as the film actor Paul Walker, who was killed in a car crash at the age of forty. (The use of the poem in this way stretches back to 1949, when lines from it were printed beneath a New York Tribune editorial on the death of Jack Lovelock, the New Zealand Olympic runner who had died at the age of thirty-nine when he fell under a subway train.) Videos of ninth grade African-American New Media students reciting ‘When I was one-and-twenty’, dance interpretations of Housman’s poems being performed by pupils at the Buenlag National High School at Calasiao in the Philippines, and a supine Mumbai-based Indian poet reciting ‘Here dead we lie because we did not choose’ to illustrate his disgust with those who do not treat soldiers with proper respect, show just how far Housman’s poems have travelled, just how widely and variously they are appreciated, interpreted and employed. Even those who scoff at the lack of quality control on YouTube could hardly fail to be moved by a performance of ‘Look not in my eyes’ in American Sign Language or a man celebrating his 103rd birthday with a recitation from memory of ‘Think no more, lad; laugh, be jolly’.

The Internet has also become one of the principal platforms for music, and music remains one of the main ways in which people first encounter Housman’s poetry, both in classical and contemporary settings. It seems only right that John France’s invaluable blog on British classical music is called ‘The Land of Lost Content’, but Housman is no longer the preserve of English pastoralists. He has nevertheless remained a point of reference in instrumental pieces written in the tradition of Butterworth and Julius Harrison, such as James Langley’s The Coloured Counties: Idyll for Orchestra from the 1960s and Edward Watson’s Blue Remembered Hills (1994) for flute, cor anglais and string trio. More importantly, Housman has also maintained a place in the continuing English song tradition. This tradition was in decline for many years after the Second World War, but interest in it is now fast growing thanks to societies devoted to individual composers, music festivals at which the songs are performed, and the availability on CD of previously neglected works.

There are those who think, as Constant Lambert did back in 1934, that contemporary composers should now leave Housman alone, that his language and mood belongs to a specific period and that there are already so many good settings of his poems in the catalogue that no more are needed. One composer who disagreed was John R. Williamson (1929–2015), who achieved the distinction of having set more of Housman’s poems than any other composer. Three years before he died, he claimed to have set ‘all of Housman’s verse, excepting the long poems’, and while this may be something of an exaggeration, the LiederNet Archive lists 121 Housman settings by him, almost all of them for baritone and piano. Other composers have written settings more likely to remain in the repertoire. Some, such as Peter Pope and Ian Venables, have followed in the earlier lyric tradition of pre-war settings; others, such as Michael Berkeley, Ronald Corp and Martin Bussey, have attempted to forge a new musical style far removed from the nostalgic English pastoral mode. Venables argues that although his cycle of four Songs of Eternity and Sorrow (2004) consciously uses the same forces as Vaughan Williams and Gurney, what made the piece contemporary was his choice of such poems as ‘Oh who is that young sinner with the handcuffs on his wrists?’, which earlier composers had shunned because of its subject matter. This poem has also been given a rollicking setting by Stephen Hough as part of Other Love Songs (2009), a cycle intended to accompany Brahms’s two sets of Liebeslieder Walzer and explore different kinds of love than the romantic heterosexual variety celebrated by the older composer. An earlier setting of the poem (1994) by the Australian composer Gordon Kerry reached a wide audience when it was taken up by the Sydney Gay & Lesbian Choir, who featured it in concerts and recordings alongside Cilla Black’s ‘Anyone Who Had a Heart’ and Abba’s ‘Dancing Queen’.

There have been many other settings of Housman’s poems by Australian and American composers as well as English ones, and the continuity between the earliest Housman settings and those being written a century later tends to have less to do with geography and landscape than with the enduring troubles suffered by young people wherever they might be. The American composer Jake Heggie has described his 2005 song cycle Here and Gone for tenor, baritone, piano and string trio as ‘a deeply personal journey of missed connections and unrequited love between two men’, and it sets Housman’s poetry alongside that of Vachel Lindsay. Heggie’s music draws upon the traditions of both the art song and music theatre, and it is his sure sense of narrative that makes this one of the most successful and moving recent cycles based on Housman’s poetry, one in which both the topographical and emotional landscapes of the poems have become universal.

While composers such as Heggie honour the classical tradition of Housman settings, elsewhere in the musical world the poetry has been radically reimagined. In August 2008 Shpetim Zogaj, later a contestant on Albanians Got Talent, posted a video on YouTube ‘from the newest country in the world’, the Republic of Kosovo, which had declared its independence from Serbia six months earlier. Dedicated ‘to all those that are scared of being In Love’, Zogaj’s performance of his own setting of ‘When I was one-and-twenty’ for voice and electric guitar is accompanied by written onscreen exhortations to accept that relationships are often difficult but to persist with them anyway – something with which Housman might mournfully have agreed. As elsewhere, this particular poem has attracted popular musicians working in a wide variety of genres, and among other people who have set and sung it are Michael Nesmith (formerly of The Monkees), the young English indie singer-songwriter Joe Booley, the German band Black Eye, and the veteran Minnesotan folk singer Billey R. Rubble.

It is unsurprising that poems linked to both the English pastoral tradition and old ballads should have attracted the attention of folk singers, but in some cases, the folk element more or less takes over. Dave Webber and Anni Fentiman’s 2002 album of unaccompanied songs Away from It All includes a track titled ‘Is Me Team a-Ploughing’, in which Housman’s poem is so thoroughly absorbed into the folk tradition that the friend is not ‘my friend’ but ‘me old friend’ and his answers to the dead lad’s questions all begin with the traditional chorus-introduction ‘It’s ay…’ rather than the poem’s ‘Ay’. Purists may blench, but this setting and performance show just how close the poem is to traditional folk song – so much so that it would not seem out of place on one of the albums of Fred Jordan (1922–2002), a Ludlow farm worker and singer of the kind Vaughan Williams or Butterworth might have tracked down, and whose discography inevitably includes a compilation album titled A Shropshire Lad (2012). Fewer liberties were taken by the Shropshire-based Polly Bolton Band, whose album Loveliest of Trees (1996) alternated readings of Housman’s poems by the actor Nigel Hawthorne with settings of them which employ piano, saxophone and synthesisers alongside more customary folk instruments such as guitar, violins and violas and Northumbrian pipes.

Two years earlier the veteran folk duo Michael Raven and Joan Mills produced an album titled A Shropshire Lad. Also based in Shropshire, Raven (1938–2008) was a prolific writer, poet, photographer, publisher and musician, who wrote many books on local topography and folklore as well as collections of folk songs arranged for guitar, one of them titled Land of Lost Content (1999). Raven composed his own music for two of the poems on his Shropshire Lad album, but the rest are set to traditional Welsh tunes arranged for voice and guitar. For Raven there was an obvious fit between Housman’s poetry and the traditional music of Wales. ‘In the Dark Ages Shropshire was ruled by the Princes of Powys,’ he wrote, ‘and Welsh blood still flows through the veins of many a Salopian. There is a link, too, between the poetry of A Shropshire Lad and the pre-Celtic Iberians from over the border, namely a melancholy mood. Sombre, brooding melodies are as typical of the Welsh as jigs and reels are of the Irish.’ The Welsh band Fernhill included a setting of ‘Bredon Hill’ on their 1998 album Llatai, as did Hilary James on her 2011 album English Sketches, and this poem has, perhaps predictably, particularly appealed to folk singers.

Jazz settings of Housman are, unsurprisingly, rather rarer, though there have been some notable examples. June Tabor’s recording of ‘The lads in their hundreds’ (2013), in which Butterworth’s tune is beautifully arranged by Iain Ballamy for voice, piano and saxophone, might be described as transitional: the song sits neatly between jazz and folk and does honour to both Butterworth and Housman. The Bulgarian opera singer Stanislava Stoytcheva’s wonderfully bluesy rendition of Samuel Barber’s ‘With rue my heart is laden’ (2014) similarly treads a borderline between jazz and classical music. Two decades earlier, the vocalist Jacqui Dankworth commissioned a major piece, Five Housman Settings, for herself and a jazz septet and classical wind quintet performing under the name New Perspectives. Among those who provided the songs was Dankworth’s father, Johnny, who had already set ‘When I was one-and-twenty’ for voice and clarinet for his wife Cleo Laine, and now set ‘Sinner’s Rue’ for his daughter. The other songs are Patrick Gowers’s setting of ‘Terence, this is stupid stuff’, a poem which for understandable reasons, not least its length, has been almost entirely left alone by composers (the only other known setting being Stanley Wilson’s in 1929 for men’s voices); Andrea Vicari’s ‘On the idle hill of summer’; and John Williams’s ‘When summer’s end is nighing’ – all of them showing Housman’s adaptability to a musical style far removed from that of the English art song. Less successful are more recent settings of three Housman poems for ‘a unique combination of extended composition and jazz instrumentation’ on Anne Mette Iversen’s 2012 album Poetry of Earth, in which Housman’s words seem wholly incidental to the music.

Housman has also been reinterpreted in what might broadly be described as the rock music tradition, sometimes becoming the inspiration for entire albums. Matt Perzinski first came across A Shropshire Lad while teaching British Literature at a Catholic boys’ school in Baltimore. ‘The moods of the poems, the narratives, the cynical beauty, and inherent comical tragedy of The Melancholy Thinking Man’s Life really got to me,’ he recalls, and so he began setting them to music. He recorded ten songs in 2006 and, as The Agrarians, released them online as Selections from Housman’s A Shropshire Lad. The arrangements are relatively simple, with guitar and percussion accompaniment and the voice double-tracked. The Pennsylvanian singer-songwriter Peter Kurie was introduced to Housman’s work in 2001 while attending classes with the American poet Jeffrey Carson: ‘I was curious about the differences between lyrics-for-singing and poems-for-reading. I wanted to write verse that could be both sung and read. Jeffrey pointed me to Housman.’ Over ten years later, as a graduate student of anthropology at Princeton, Kurie met the Irish poet Paul Muldoon, who had written some lyrics for a local rock band. ‘He got me thinking again about the possibilities, and problems, of setting poems to song. Remembering Housman, I started rereading him. I realised there was an opportunity to “update”/reinvent/reinterpret Housman’s verse in the modern musical styles I enjoy: rock, pop, jazz, folk, electronica, etc.’ In the summer of 2013 Kurie took time off from writing his dissertation to spend two months composing and recording an album released later that year as Housman Revisited. Musically the album is both sophisticated and engagingly eclectic, running indeed through several musical styles but remaining true to the poems, demonstrating how they are open to a variety of musical interpretations.

Back in England, Wild Billy Childish & The Spartan Dreggs included a song titled ‘A Shropshire Lad’ (a setting of ‘To an Athlete Dying Young’) on their 2012 album Coastal Command, and released it as a single that same year. Childish’s music is hard to categorise, since he tends to move from genre to genre, but this song has a raw, garage feel to it. This may not seem the most obvious genre for setting Housman, but Childish went on to record a six-track EP of songs derived from A Shropshire Lad. A Tribute to A.E. Housman (2013) features the Van der Weyde portrait of Housman on the sleeve, and its tracks are fairly similar in their approach to the earlier setting, propelled by driving rhythms on guitar and drums against which Housman’s words are chanted just as if they were rock lyrics.

There are many other examples of Housman rocking around the world. In 2013 Quieter than Spiders, a synthpop band based in Shanghai, freely adapted ‘Into my heart an air that kills’ for a number titled ‘The Land of Lost Content’, while the first track on the Swedish rock-noir band Les Fleurs Du Mal’s Concrete Ravings (2013) is ‘A Remorseful Day’, prefaced by a reading of the last stanza of ‘How clear, how lovely bright’ and incorporating phrases from the poem (‘Oh, I drove off a cliff alright / past human touch and sound and sight’) throughout. The Russian electronica musician Barrytone’s 2011 album Argonauts contains an instrumental track titled ‘Land of Lost Content’, and the acoustic German group Treigbut perform their own version of ‘Loveliest of Trees’. Most unlikely of all, in 2015 ‘a group of dudes (currently in high school) that just want to make boring school projects a little fun and interesting’, and calling themselves Ghoul Industries, posted a video on YouTube in which a beret-wearing youth introduces performances of two songs he dubs ‘A.E. Housemusic’. It’s a nice pun, and while the setting of ‘When I was one-and-twenty’ is nearer energetic hillbilly bluegrass, ‘To an Athlete Dying Young’ shows that if the words are read in an exaggerated rhythm and to the right accompaniment it is possible to rap Housman.

The latter poem inspired a different kind of tribute when an American rock group that had started out as Army of Strippers changed its name to Housman’s Athletes. This was done on the grounds that Housman’s poem ‘is about an athlete that wins all of his races and abruptly dies at the top of his game; never defeated, never growing old, never fading away’. As the band’s guitarist D.J. Foley puts it: ‘Our goal as a band is for our music to have some longevity. We want to never get old. We want our music to stick around forever.’ Given the band’s name, it seems wholly appropriate that their 2008 debut album, Race to the Finish, should include a track titled ‘Unrequited’.

While Housman’s words are used by a wide variety of bands, the musician who most embodies the poet’s spirit is Morrissey. In 1995 The Smiths released a compilation album, Singles, with an image of Diana Dors on its sleeve. The images for the band’s albums were always chosen by Morrissey, becoming a gallery of his personal icons, and the image he selected of Dors was a still from Yield to the Night, a 1956 film in which she plays a convicted murderer called Mary Hilton. The film was based on Joan Henry’s best-selling 1954 novel of the same name, through which ‘Loveliest of trees, the cherry now’ runs as a constant motif, and lines from the poem become Mary’s last thought as she is hanged. This motif is carried over into the film, in which at one point Mary picks up her lover’s copy of A Shropshire Lad and reads the poem in full, and so the still Morrissey selected for Singles salutes Housman as well as Dors.

Morrissey was himself one of those troubled lads for whom Housman’s poems held a special appeal. Growing up in working-class Manchester, he was a book-loving boy who felt that he didn’t fit in, didn’t make friends easily, and stood apart from his easy-going peers. Asked in August 1998 during a phone-in on KCXX Radio, San Bernardino which poets had influenced his songs, Morrissey replied: ‘Well, the poet who means the most to me is a poet called A.E. Housman. Have you ever heard of him?’ The listener, who had been taking a literature class at the California State University in Los Angeles, replied that indeed he had: ‘I am a fan of A.E. Housman as well, so that’s great to know. What poems in particular?’ Morrissey did not answer this directly, but described the poems in general as ‘really, really sad and really powerful but beautiful’. The listener recognised at once why such poems might appeal to Morrissey, replying: ‘Well, I think it would be an understatement to say that your lyrics are very sad and very powerful.’

The bands appearing on small, independent record labels in the 1980s produced what became known as ‘music for misfits’ because it found its audience among young people who stood apart from the mainstream, tended to be introspective, and were often fluid or confused in their sexuality. The Smiths rapidly emerged as the most popular and enduring representatives of the Indie scene, and the songs Morrissey and Johnny Marr wrote for the band have occupied a similar position in the youth culture of the past thirty years that the poems of Housman did for W.H. Auden’s generation: they seemed ‘perfectly to express the sensibility of a male adolescent’. As a young Scottish admirer put it in an online fanzine, using an appropriately Housman-like metaphor: ‘As a teenager, I had felt at times that I was ploughing a lonely furrow, but Morrissey’s music became my constant companion.’

That Morrissey should embrace Housman is no surprise, since the singer has always toyed publicly with the idea of his own buried emotional and sexual life. He has described Housman as ‘Vulnerable and complex […] a complete mystery even to those who knew him’, and this is precisely what Morrissey himself projected both on and off stage while with The Smiths. Morrissey has always divided opinion, but whether you loved him or loathed him, you could see exactly why he was drawn to Housman when he wrote of him in his Autobiography: ‘A stern custodian of art and life, he shunned the world and he lived a solitary existence of monastic pain, unconnected to others […] The pain done to Housman allowed him to rise above the mediocre and find the words that most of us need help in order to say. The price paid by Housman was a life alone; the righteous rhymer enduring each year unloved and unable to love.’ This is more or less how Morrissey has portrayed himself in the book. His refusal to declare himself sexually led to a great deal of speculation about his love life, or lack of it, just as Housman’s reticence had provoked curiosity; but his fans were always very well informed about other aspects of his life, and while he was touring America in 1992 to promote his solo album Your Arsenal a devotee hurled a copy of A Shropshire Lad onto the stage. Thereafter Morrissey’s musical collaborator Boz Boorer would sometimes read aloud from the book during concerts. In an online fanzine in 2013 Morrissey chose the words ‘If by chance your eye offend you’ as the headline of an announcement that a proposed tour of South America was being cancelled for lack of funding. This led a fan to post the entire poem, presumably to provide a context for such a puzzling appropriation.

It is evident that Morrissey has done a good deal for Housman’s popularity, since eager fans seek out any literary work their idol recommends. Some of these fans might have avoided poetry altogether until led to Housman. ‘I thought his poems would be drivel about babies and flowers,’ one fan wrote, ‘but it’s really good stuff about suicide.’ The image of the young Morrissey assuaging his loneliness with literature and music has struck a chord with many of his followers. ‘When I was growing up, books and records had always been my refuge, and again I shared this in common with Morrissey,’ wrote the Scottish ploughboy of that lonely teenage furrow. ‘And, through the years, he has encouraged me to read so many writers whose work I now love and admire, such as Oscar Wilde and A.E. Housman.’ There is plenty of evidence that Morrissey has spread Housman’s fame far and wide. One fan posted ‘Loveliest of trees, the cherry now’ online on the grounds that Morrissey had ‘quoted the last line – more or less – while appearing live in Japan’, while another posted one of Housman’s most comically despondent poems, ‘Yonder see the morning blink’, because Morrissey had quoted lines from it during a concert in Honolulu. For some, Housman and Morrissey have become inextricably and distractingly entangled: ‘Whilst sitting in my English Literature exam this morning,’ one young fan wrote, ‘I came across a poem which I had not read before (even though I have been studying the book all year) entitled “Here Dead We Lie”, containing the line “Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose”. I had “Mama Lay Softly On The Riverbed” stuck in my head for the rest of the exam. If I fail, I blame Morrissey.’ The song in question, from Morrissey’s 2009 album Years of Refusal, contains an abbreviated version of Housman’s line. Such is Morrissey’s assumed expertise in Housman Studies that it has even been proposed that he turn his hand to biography: ‘I wish he’d write biographies on his faves,’ writes Eurydice. ‘I couldn’t put down the Autobiography when he wrote about Housman.’

The Morrissey-Solo website is particularly abuzz with Housman. Two regular contributors post comments under the handles ‘The spirit of A.E. Housman (once a writer)’ and ‘A.E. Housman (A Shropshire Lad)’. Other fans simply post Housman’s poems, and the reasons for doing so are sometimes not hard to guess: ‘Baker Street Queen’ selects ‘He would not stay for me’. It is on this forum that one Morrissey devotee recommends Housman’s work as ‘Incredibly poignant verse if conventional in form. Like all great poetry, it expresses the seemingly unexpressible.’ Morrissey appears to have done something similar in his songs, putting into words feelings that some of his fans have had difficulty articulating, and in doing so eliciting the same kind of recognition and gratitude among his generation’s ‘luckless lads’ that Housman did.

On 22 March 1985 a statue of Housman was unveiled in Bromsgrove High Street. Having been pedestrianised, the street was not as Housman had known it, but the weather seemed about right, the skies dark, the rain falling heavily and steadily. By the time of the unveiling, the downpour had stopped and large crowds had gathered to witness the Duke of Westminster pull on the cord that would release Kenneth Potts’s statue from its Union flag shroud. Standing on a rock, Housman is dressed for walking, his cap and walking stick in one hand, his other hand thrust casually into his trouser pocket. He looks down the High Street, which is now undergoing regeneration after a period of sad decay, with nail parlours and pound shops occupying premises that once served more traditional uses. Bromsgrove remains proud of its son, who is commemorated by five individual plaques on buildings associated with him, including Perry Hall, now a boarding house for Bromsgrove (formerly King Edward’s) School and renamed Housman Hall. The district council in association with the Housman Society publishes a well-designed and informative leaflet which latter-day pilgrims can use to follow ‘The Housman Trail’ in the area.

Shropshire too has embraced its adopted son in the knowledge that many people are attracted to the region because of Housman and his poems. As Brian J. Bailey writes in a chapter of his Portrait of Shropshire titled ‘Those Blue Remembered Hills’: ‘Rural Shropshire is known the world over, not because of geography text-books or cheap package-tours but because of A.E. Housman.’ Acknowledging this, books about the county frequently mention or quote Housman, sometimes pointing out discrepancies between what he wrote and what the tourist might find, as at Hughley. Bailey rightly insists that ‘The purpose of art is exaltation, not topography, and what suited Housman’s poetic purpose has exalted this county’, and most guidebooks concur. H.W. Timperley’s account of Wenlock Edge in his Shropshire Hills is suffused with Housman. He notes the blooming of the wild cherries – the tree Housman had in mind rather than the pink-flowered hybrids that have in places been planted in mistaken tribute to him – and writes, in what is essentially a prose version of ‘’Tis time, I think, by Wenlock town’:

When it is far away the Edge is often vividly remembered because of flower, tree blossom, or berry, once seen, or maybe usually seen at its best there. Not only the flower, but all the Edge round it is clear to the inward eye, and not coldly as something casually remembered and nothing more, but kindling the imagination, setting it aglow, until an old joy is revived as fresh as new, and one becomes a partly wondering, partly accusing self-questioner, saying: ‘Why am I not there now?’

Since Housman actually visited Wenlock Edge, Timperley has some justification for describing him as ‘among the Edge’s willing bondsmen and their [sic] poet above all’. The sense of an ancient and mysterious past that is present in ‘On Wenlock Edge the wood’s in trouble’ strikes Timperley while he stands among the remains of the Bronze Age stone circle on another eminence, Stapeley Hill in the south-west of the county:

There is one moment of the day when the solitude of the circle on its hill, the feeling it rouses that of all we should know about its significance the greater part will never be clearly known, and the far reach of the views to those remote mountain tops make me remember A.E. Housman’s

Comrade, look not on the west …

Edmund Vale, in his 1949 book on Shropshire for Robert Hale’s ‘County Books’ series, believes that the works of both Housman and Mary Webb embody a prevalent Salopian characteristic: ‘gaiety and sadness going hand in hand is in the people and in their scenery. You feel it by the Wrekin, and on the Clee Hills’ – apparently blown there from the neighbouring Welsh hills. If this seems somewhat fanciful, it is as nothing to Vale’s account of the burial of Housman’s ashes at St Laurence’s Church in Ludlow. Many guidebooks mention that Housman found his final resting place here, but Vale believes that it was requested that the ashes ‘should be lodged within the fabric of the church. This was done. The place selected was the north wall of the nave […] The ashes of the poet were injected through a joint in the masonry on the outside of the wall and sealed with a grouting of liquid cement. A brass plate marks the site on the outside of the church.’ How Vale came across this preposterous, macabre and wholly untrue story is not known. Anyone less likely than Housman to wish to become part of the fabric of a church is hard to imagine, and his ashes were in fact buried in the ground outside the church, between two buttresses on the north wall. Soil from his two childhood homes in Bromsgrove had not only been mixed with the ashes but was also sprinkled on top of the casket, rather as the Unknown Warrior was buried in Westminster Abbey in soil imported from the battlefields of the First World War. The tablet on the wall (which is of stone, not brass, and quotes the poem Moses Jackson remembered in his final illness) was already in place, and a simple stone plaque bearing the legend HIC JACET / A.E.H. was placed over the grave itself. The cherry tree subsequently planted near the spot died, as did several successors before it was decided to plant one (a pink hybrid, alas) in another part of the graveyard. In the church itself is a brightly coloured wall-hanging made by the Borderers’ Patchwork and Quilting Group to mark the centenary of A Shropshire Lad.

Elsewhere Housman’s most popular book has been commemorated on railways and canals and in breweries and nurseries. At the turn of the twenty-first century the British Rail Class 67 mainline locomotives were introduced on Britain’s railway network, among them No. 67012, ‘A Shropshire Lad’, which operated on several lines, including the Wrexham and Shropshire Railway, until the company closed in 2011. In its elegant silver and dark grey W&SR livery, the train was also produced as a 1:76-scale electric model by the well-known Hornby toy company. The real train ended its life with Chiltern Railways, and after it had been taken out of service its nameplate was auctioned for charity. ‘A Shropshire Lad’ far outclassed the other three nameplates at the sale at Pershore in Worcestershire in July 2015 – even ‘Thomas Telford’. Whereas the other plates sold for between £1400 and £3600 (excluding the additional buyer’s premium), a report of the sale stated that ‘A Shropshire Lad’ ‘pulled in a whopping £7,100 plus premium, costing the buyer just under £8,000 and setting a class record by a huge margin. The nameplate was highly fought for in the room but if you’re a Shropshire lad, worked for Wrexham and Shropshire railways and passed out your driving career on 67012 then it must have been worth every penny.’

The winning bidder would have been able to celebrate with a pint or two of ‘Shropshire Lad’, an ale brewed by Wood’s Shropshire Beers at Craven Arms – a town in which you can also find Land of Lost Content, otherwise the National Museum of Popular Culture. ‘Shropshire Lad’ is a traditionally brewed spring bitter, first introduced in 1996 to mark the centenary of Housman’s volume. According to the manufacturers the flavour is ‘evocative of the county and a bucolic lifestyle’ – and it has proved one of their most popular beers. While Housman – and Terence Hearsay – would surely have approved of this beer, he might have balked at ‘Shropshire Lass’, ‘a blonde stunner […] lighter in strength as well as style’, which was introduced in 2007 in response to requests for ‘a golden ale to complement the strong and traditional virtues of Shropshire Lad’.

As someone who watched beacons burn for his own monarch and whose youngest brother was a professional soldier, Housman might also have been pleased that a narrowboat called Shropshire Lad, manned by military personnel seriously injured in Afghanistan, took part in the Thames pageant organised for the present Queen’s Diamond Jubilee in June 2012. Gardeners, meanwhile, can plant a rose named ‘A Shropshire Lad’, a peach-pink climber introduced by the nurseryman David Austin in 1996 to mark the book’s centenary. Austin has patented a collection of ‘English Roses’, bred to retain all the advantages of old roses but without their drawbacks, and this one is vigorous, repeat flowering, highly scented, and (unlike Housman) almost thornless.

Housman’s spirit and words have been invoked as the centenary of the First World War is being marked around the world, a four-year act of commemoration that has resulted in all manner of events, exhibitions, books, films, concerts and recordings. Regardless of chronology, Housman continues to be associated with the national trauma of 1914–18. In the run-up to the ninetieth anniversary of the Armistice on 11 November 2008, one of the poems displayed in London’s tube carriages as part of the ‘Poems on the Underground’ initiative was ‘Here dead we lie because we did not choose’, written about the fallen of the Boer War, but like much of Housman’s poetry, both timeless and saying in a few words all that needs to be said. New settings of ‘The lads in their hundreds to Ludlow come in for the fair’ have appeared on centenary albums, and in new anthologies of First World War poetry Housman frequently takes his place alongside the soldier-poets. This is perhaps as it should be, for he was the supreme elegist of and for his age. He may not have been a combatant like Owen, Rosenberg and Sassoon, reporting back from the front line the shocking cost of modern industrialised warfare, but he understood those young men who had marched away in 1914. He knew, and could convey in poems that anyone could understand and appreciate, their moods, their fears, and what they had in their hearts. He also understood the world they had left behind them and distilled in his poems the essence of a rural England that was already passing in 1896. This may not be a real place, but it was one that people recognise and for which they still search. We all have our lands of lost content.

And we all have our Moses Jacksons, people we have loved unwisely, secretly, consumingly, and with little prospect of reciprocation. ‘I suppose you have read A.E. Housman,’ the Second World War poet Keith Douglas wrote in 1939 to a young woman he was unsuccessfully wooing. ‘If you will take as from me the saddest and most moving love poem he ever wrote, and read it well, you will have much better what I want to say than I could tell you.’ This is one of the roles poetry plays in our lives: to put into words what we cannot, or at any rate not so effectively and memorably. For those who care about academic league tables, Housman may be a minor poet rather than a major one, but, as Auden pointed out, this ‘does not mean that his poems are inferior in artistic merit to those of a major poet, only that the range of theme and emotion is narrow, and that the poems show no development over the years. On the evidence of the text alone, it would be very difficult to say whether a poem appeared in A Shropshire Lad, published when he was thirty-seven, or in Last Poems, published when he was sixty-three.’ Another way of putting this would be to say that Housman’s poetry constitutes a coherent, consistent and instantly recognisable body of work.

Housman’s notion that poetry should provide ‘that thrilling utterance which pierces the heart and brings tears to the eyes’ is what his own poems have done over many generations. The ‘peculiar function of poetry’, he said in his Leslie Stephen Lecture, was ‘to transfuse emotion – not to transmit thought but to set up in the reader’s sense a vibration corresponding to what was felt by the writer’. This direct connection between poet and reader, producing vibrations like those of a tuning fork that has been gently struck, is one of the principal reasons why Housman’s poetry has been taken into people’s hearts. A contemporary commentator described Housman’s lecture as ‘notably independent of current fashion’, and it was delivered at a period when the current fashion was for intellectualism in poetry, for the complex and allusive poems of T.S. Eliot and the rising generation headed by W.H. Auden. We know, however, that Auden rated Housman highly, while Eliot, who sent Housman an advance copy of Journey of the Magi inscribed with his ‘respectful homage’, is reported to have remarked: ‘We should all write like Housman – if only we could.’

Fashion, literary or otherwise, was not something that greatly interested Housman. A Shropshire Lad had stood apart from the modish urban poetry of the period in which it was published and has survived many other fluctuations of literary taste since then. As the decades have passed, the book’s reputation has ebbed and flowed among our cultural arbiters, who are perhaps more swayed by fashion than the ordinary readers for whom Housman wrote his poems. And it is those ordinary readers who have done something much more important. They have continued to respond to the poems as Housman hoped they would, have felt that vibration he wanted to set up in them, and have continued to read A Shropshire Lad for 120 years.