SOURCE: Firchow, Peter E. “The Land of Lost Content: Housman's Shropshire.” Mosaic 13, no. 2 (winter 1980): 103-21.

In the following essay, Firchow discusses the significance of Housman's representations of nature in the pastoral setting of A Shropshire Lad.

“In 1920, when I was about seventeen,” George Orwell recalled in “Inside the Whale” (1940), “I probably knew the whole of the Shropshire Lad by heart. I wonder how much impression the Shropshire Lad makes at this moment on a boy of the same age and more or less the same cast of mind?” Very little, Orwell hastens to conclude, and goes on to puzzle out what it might have been that “appealed so deeply to a single generation, the generation born round about 1900.”¹

His answer is twofold: first, it was the regional-pastoral air of A Shropshire Lad which was attractive to “the rentier-professional class” which ceased “once and for all to have...