SOURCE: Lore, Janice. “Housman's ‘Terence, This Is Stupid Stuff …’” Explicator 56, no. 3 (spring 1998): 140-42.

In the following essay, Lore argues that the Terence in Housman's poem “Terence” of A Shropshire Lad may be a reference to the Roman playwright of that name.

According to Grant Richards, A. E. Housman's publisher, and Laurence Housman, his brother, A. E. originally intended to call his first volume of verse The Poems of Terence Hearsay. A. W. Pollard, Housman's friend and roommate at Oxford, is credited with talking him out of it and suggesting A Shropshire Lad (L. Housman 71; Richards 13-14). This is the one explanation given for Terence in the poem “Terence, This is Stupid Stuff. …” Arthur Waugh, the adviser for Kegan Paul, where Housman first had A Shropshire Lad published, wrote in his book One Man's Road:

The original manuscript bore the legend “By Terence Hearsay” which explains the fact that...