f7d9395c_atings_and_reviews___Gwern_net__Review
[Title] A Shropshire Lad [Author] A.E. Housman [Rating] ★★★★ [Year] 1990 [Read] 2015/05/27 [Review] 
A Shropshire Lad (8.3k words; 1.5 hours; Wikisource edition) A.E. Housman’s first collection of 63 poems. I enjoy his terse, rhyming style of very short lines, which he somehow makes look easy and almost conversational, particularly poems II, IV, XXIII, XXX, XXXIII, XLIV, XLIX, LXII, LXIII; it’s particularly impressive how completely consistent they all are with each other. This consistency meant that when I read the parodies quoted on Wikipedia, I found them very funny. It is short enough that the themes of romantic love and death do not grow too wearying before the end, although I was not particularly taken with the patriotic poems, particularly in a collection published not all that long before WWI (“State is the name of the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly it lies; and this lie slips from its mouth: ‘I, the state, am the people.’”), but on the plus side, none of the complacent Christianity still in vogue at the time. Overall, a good collection. I will continue on to Housman’s other collections.
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