While the world marks the centenary of TS Eliot’s The Waste Land (Editorial, 13 April) we forget that more attention was given at the time to a collection by a very different poet. As Nick Rennison says in his book 1922, for poetry lovers “the great event” of October that year was the publication of AE Housman’s Last Poems.
Twenty-six years after the appearance of A Shropshire Lad, the new collection attracted widespread critical acclaim. For JC Squire, writing in the Observer, the 41 poems contained “scarcely a line which is not perfectly musical, scarcely a word which is not accurate and necessary”.
Sir Andrew Motion, in his foreword to the Housman Society’s commemorative edition, identifies themes shared with the modernists, but which are also revealed in the “self-conscious beauty” of both phrase and cadence. Housman’s Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries speaks as clearly in 2022 as it did a hundred years ago.
Max Hunt
Secretary, the Housman Society
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