Abstract
In these times of our own fin de siècle when detective novels such as Colin Dexter’s Daughters of Cain or Andrew Taylor’s An Air That Kills (replete with epigraphs from A Shropshire Lad) remind us of the continuing attention drawn to A. E. Housman’s first book of poems, we might find our literary awareness expanded by a backward glance. The reception of this now long-familiar little book has never been exhaustively evaluated, and thus what follows, itself by no means exhaustive, may recall much to thoroughgoing Housmanians and offer additional or new perspectives for many others.1 What with so many literary periodicals circulating at that time, plus the seventy-odd daily newspapers in London alone during the era when A Shropshire Lad was new literary fare, a team effort and much time might be essential to ferret out all early notices of Housman’s first book of verse. From my assessment of the reviews, I hope to offer sensible conclusions in regard to the impression made by Housman’s poems. My work includes substantial quotation from now century-old periodicals because, even with current methods of access retrieval, along with the panoply of contemporaneous notices reprinted by Philip Gardner, certain commentary might not readily attract investigators.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Bibliography
Anon. ‘A Shropshire Lad’, The Academy (20 August 1898) 17–72.
Anon. ‘A Shropshire Lad’, The Argonaut (San Francisco) (15 March 1897) 9.
Anon. ‘A Shropshire Lad’, The Athenaeum (8 October 1898) 488.
Anon. ‘A Shropshire Lad’, Book News 15 (April 1897) 421.
Anon. ‘A Shropshire Lad’, The Bookman (New York) (6 July 1897) 434–5.
Anon. ‘The Bookman s Table: A Shropshire Lad’, The Bookman (London) (15 October 1898) 27.
Anon. ‘Library and Foyer’, The Boston Evening Transcript (14 April 1897) 10.
Anon. ‘A Shropshire Lad’, The Citizen (Philadelphia) (3 November 1897) 215–16.
Anon. ‘A Shropshire Poet’, The Daily Chronicle (31 October 1896) 3.
Anon. ‘Verse’, The Daily News (11 May 1896) 8.
Anon. ‘A New Book of Verse’, The Daily Tatler (New York) (19 November 1896) 3.
Anon. ‘A Shropshire Lad’, The Guardian (3 June 1896) 872.
Anon. ‘Poetry’, The Literary World (17 April 1897) 128.
Anon. ‘A Shropshire Lad’, The Literary World (31 October 1898) 278.
Anon. ‘Books of the Week’, The Manchester Guardian (16 April 1896) 7.
Anon. ‘Books of the Week’, The Manchester Guardian (4 October 1898) 9.
Anon. ‘Recent British Poetry’, The Nation (9 December 1897) 459–61.
Anon. ‘The Literary World’, The St. James’s Gazette (31 December 1898) 4.
Rapid Reviews’, The St. James’s Gazette (19 February 1903) 16.
Anon. ‘Poems of A. E. Housman’, The San Francisco Chronicle (14 March 1897) 4.
Anon. ‘Recent Poetry and Verse: A Shropshire Lad’, The Speaker (27 June 1896) 694.
Anon. ‘A Shropshire Lad’, The Speaker (26 November 1898) 637.
Anon. “’A Shropshire Lad”: A Bibliography’, The Times Literary Supplement (30 March 1946) 156.
Anon. ‘Books and Their Writers’, T. P.’s. Weekly (27 February 1903) 489–90.
Anon. ‘Women’s Tragedies’, The Weekly Sun (23 June 1895) 2.
Anon. ‘At the Sign of the Lyre’, The Weekly Sun (London) (17 May 1896) 2.
Anon. ‘Books and Bookmeri,’ The Weekly Sun (London) (7 July 1896) 2.
Anon. ‘Poems by Two Brothers’, The Weekly Sun (London) (Literary Supplement) (6 December 1896) 2.
Anon. ‘Women’s Tragedies’, The Western Daily Mercury (4 May 1895) 3.
Anon. ‘Women’s Tragedies’, The Western Daily News (10 May 1895) 7.
Archer, William, ‘A. E. Housman’, The Fortnightly Review (1 August 1898) 263–8.
Beardsley, Aubrey, The Letters of Aubrey Beardsley, eds Henry Maas, J. L. Duncan and W. G. Good (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1970).
Bentley, E. C., ‘Greedy Night: A Parody’, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine 4. 1 (January 1943) 27.
Bland, Hubert, ‘A Shropshire Lad’, The New Age (16 April 1898) 37.
Boume, Jeremy, The Westerly Wanderer: A Brief Portrait of A. E. Housman (Bromsgrove: The Housman Society, 1996).
Cather, Willa, The World and the Parish: Willa Cather’s Articles and Reviews 1893–1902, ed. William M. Curtin (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1970) pp. 357–8, 706–9.
Claudius Clear (W. Robertson Nicoll), ‘The Correspondence of Claudius Clear’, The British Weekly (23 April 1896) 9.
Coulthard, A. R., ‘The Flawed Craft of A. E. Housman’, The Victorian Newsletter 84 (1993) 29–31.
Dexter, Colin, Daughters of Cain (New York: Crown Publishers, 1994; Ballantine Books, 1996).
Fisher, Benjamin F., ‘The Poets of the Nineties’, Victorian Poetry 33 (1995) 550–4.
Gale, Norman, ‘Some Volumes of Verse: A Shropshire Lad’, The Academy (11 July 1896) 30–1.
Gardner, Philip (ed.), A. E. Housman: The Critical Heritage (London, New York: Routledge, 1992).
Goldring, Douglas, Odd Man Out: The Autobiography of a ‘Propaganda Novelist’ (London: Chapman and Hall, 1935).
Greene, Ghussan Rouse, ‘The Public Reputation of A. E. Housman s Poetry in England and America’ (Dissertation, University of South Carolina, 1978).
Guiney, Louise Imogen, Letters of Louise Imogen Gainey, ed. Grace Guiney, 2 vols (New York and London: Harper and Bros, 1926).
Guiney, Louise Imogen, ‘A Shropshire Lad’, The Chap-Book (1 February 1897) 245–6.
Henneman, John Bell, ‘A Shropshire Lad’, The Sewanee Review 14 (July 1906) 381–2.
Housman, A. E., Collected Poems and Selected Prose, ed. Christopher Ricks (London: Penguin, 1988, 1989).
Housman, A. E., The Letters of A. E. Housman, ed. Henry Maas (London: Rupert Hart-Davis; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971).
Housman, Laurence. My Brother, A. E. Housman (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1938).
Jebb, Keith. A. E. Housman (Bridgend: Seren Books (Border Lines Series), 1992).
Kuryluk, Ewa, Salome and Judas in the Cave of Sex (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1987).
Le Gallienne, Richard. ‘Wanderings in Bookland’, The Idler 9 (June 1896) 727.
Le Gallienne, Richard, ‘A Shropshire Lad’, The Star (11 May 1896) 1.
Macdonnell, Annie, ‘A Shropshire Lad’, The Bookman (London) 10 (June 1896) 83.
Moore, Doris Langley, E. Nesbit: A Biography, rev. edn (Philadelphia, New York: Chilton Books, 1966).
Naiditch, P. G., ‘A Forgotten Notice of “A Shropshire Lad”’, American Notes and Queries 21 (1982) 44.
Nesbit, Edith), ‘A New Poet’, The National Observer (11 July 1896) 242–4.
Page, Norman, A. E. Housman: A Critical Biography (London: Macmillan; New York: Schocken Books, 1983).
Payne, William Morton, ‘Recent Poetry’, The Dial (1 October 1897) 188–9.
Richards, Grant, ‘A Shropshire Lad’, The Review of Reviews (London) 1 August 1896: 187; rptd ’Notes from Our London Correspondent’, The Review of Reviews (New York) (14 September 1896) 371.
Robbins, Ruth. “’A very curious construction”: masculinity and the poetry of A. E. Housman and Oscar Wilde’, Cultural Politics at the Fin de Siècle, eds Sally Ledger and Scott McCracken (London and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995) pp. 137–59.
Taylor, Andrew, An Air That Kills (London: Hodder and Stoughton; New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994).
Ward, T. H. ‘Books of the Week: Short Notices’, The London Times (27 March 1896) 13.
Waugh, Alec, The Early Years of Alec Waugh (London: Cassell, 1962).
Editor information
Copyright information
© 2000 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Fisher, B.F. (2000). The Critical Reception of A Shropshire Lad. In: Holden, A.W., Birch, J.R. (eds) A. E. Housman. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-62279-5_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-62279-5_2
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-62281-8
Online ISBN: 978-1-349-62279-5
eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)