The land of lost content

Published at the author’s expense in 1896, A.E. Housman’s A Shropshire Lad did not at first attract many readers. It was only after it had been taken up by an ambitious young publisher called Grant Richards that it began to sell. The poems’ popularity increased further when English composers, deciding that they had found their own Heine or Müller, began setting them individually or as song cycles. Between 1906 and 1911 the average annual sale rose to more than 13,500, and by the time the first world war broke out the book was reputed to be ‘in every pocket’. Its themes of love and loss, of nostalgia for a ‘far country’ to which one could never return, and of ‘lads that will die in their glory and never be old’ seemed suddenly and poignantly of the moment.

Housman’s personal reputation, however, remained that of a dour and unapproachable bachelor don who devoted his professional life to emending often obscure Latin texts.