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The melancholy of unrequited love and the English countryside (and more specifically "the love that dare not say its name" and an idyllic vision of 19th-century Shropshire) lay at the heart ("core" seems a crude word here) of the work of Georgian poet A.E. Housman. Images of young dead soldiers and the longing for a pastoral beauty take shape through carefully crafted words that both embody an intense emotion and a life long struggle to hold the reins of the same emotion and to sublimate it into...
as robert lowell observed, it was as if housman had foreseen the somme.
Having never read Houseman before, I was surprised to find such sleek and potent ideas beneath the tidy exteriors of his terse little stanzas. Will definitely look for more of his work.
very lyrical.
I think we can file Housman under 'O' for overrated. He knew how to work a rhyme scheme. But I was often struck by how outdated or pointless or redundant his work seems. You may expect a lot of references to death, soldiers, and nature (of rural England). Hollinghurst devoted over half of this overview to pieces from A Shropshire Lad, and rightly so. It is the collection most people think of when they think of Housman. None of the selections from Last Poems did anything for me. A few notable poe...