Shire Lad in "Inside the Whale,"' an Essay He Wrote in 1940.2 He Was Himself
SHROPSHIRE REVISITED Theodora and Alfred Kroeber, 1959 Our century continues to be much occupied with death, and our creative energies to expend themselves on one aspect or another of death, whether in the waging of war, the invention of implements and devices of war, or in pol- itical and social thinking, or in the plastic arts and literature. Poets are said to speak prophetically. This could mean that, some time before the first World Wiar, their poems had begun to emphasize death over life. Poe, Emily Dickinson, Swinburne, Housman, Kipling, Yeats, and Eliot do indeed use the words death, dead, die, dying, significantly more often than the words life, alive, live, living, and Housman, at the seeming apex of this twentieth- century death-directed interest, is discovered to have employed seventy-one per cent of death words to twenty-nine per cent of life words.1 Since Housman Vrote A Shro shire Lad there has been a world war, and since he published his Last Poems there have been the vertiginous twenties, a depression, and a second World ibr, with their presently complex aftermaths. Reviewing the poetry of the past half-century or so, a style profile, however tentative and incomplete, begins to emerge. We--the English and the Americans--faced what followed on Sarajevo with the bravado and despair of the lads of Housman's balladlike and simple poetry. We volunteered for glory and friendship and death. Never since our immersion in that first world war have values been for us as clear-cut as they were before. It is Housman who gives those lost values their perfect and limited, if astringently negative, voice.
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