The Poet Laureate Of Englishness

Revisiting A. E. Housman in the age of Brexit

- Adam Kirsch

GREAT POETS FALL into two categories: those whose public personas are of a piece with their work, and those whose personalities seem to contradict their work. If you met, say, Lord Byron, you would have no doubt that this was the man who wrote “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage.” Byron was as dramatic, world-weary, and scandalous in a drawing room as he was on the page. By contrast, if you were introduced to T. S. Eliot, you might have trouble making the connection between this buttoned-up bank clerk and the nightmare enchantment of “The Waste Land.” The patron saint of this latter type—the poet whose poetry is conspicuously at odds with his or her person—would have to be Alfred Edward Housman, the author of A Shropshire Lad and a writer who became, over the course of the 20th century, a kind of tutelary genius of Englishness.

The 63 lyrics in that book, first published in 1896, have a purity of speech and intensity of feeling that lent the collection the aura of a classic from the moment of its appearance. “You may read it in half-an-hour,” said one early reviewer of the book, “but there are things in it you will scarce forget in a lifetime.” What Housman writes about, almost without exception, is sorrow: lost love, nostalgia, mutability, grief, and death. He seems to understand everything about the pain of life, and the beauty of that pain—the way sušering itself can become a source of bittersweet pleasure. He is a poet who can’t listen to a blackbird sing without hearing a summons to the grave:

Lie down, lie down, young yeoman;

What use to rise and rise?

Rise man a thousand mornings

Yet down at last he lies,

And then the man is wise.