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 locale-
an 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