Shropshire: A Place of Imagined Sexual ContentmentPublished in 1869, AE Housman's A Shropshire Lad stands as one of the most socially acclaimed collections of English poetry of the Victorian era. This period of British history is shown, however, through judicial direction (the Criminal Law Amendment of 1885), to conflict with Housman's own internal conflicts regarding the homoerotic tendencies he discovered in his admiration for his Oxford comrade Moses Jackson. Housman, unlike other English literary figures such as Oscar Wilde and Thomas Hardy, was not an artist who found it necessary to directly confront Britain with the political dissensions imposed by his works. Instead, “for Housman, self-discovery was so disturbing and disconcerting that poetry was a means of revealing it” (Bayley 44). The county of Shropshire is central to much of his poetry, but it is used simply as "a personification of the writer's memories, dreams, and affections"; meanwhile, Housman's central character is one "who could both be himself and not be himself" (Scott-Kilvert 26). In what Housman himself considers one of his best poems, "XXVII: Is My Team Plowing," the focus is on a conversation between a dead man and one of his friends from his previous life (Housman 18). "XXII: The street echoes to the footsteps of the soldiers;" meanwhile, expresses an emotional wonder discovered in the eyes of a passing soldier (Housman 15). Both the ambiguous quality of the dead man's final question (18 ll. 25-26) in poem XXVII and the nature of the chance encounter in XXII illustrate the subtle current underlying Housman's enigmatic sexuality. “Is My Team Plowing” is in the form of the “primitive ballad meters, which Housman revived”, and mainly “employed for a poetry not of action but of introspection” (Scott-Kilvert 25). The play begins with the dead man questioning trivialities such as his "team" (l. 1) which he "led" (l. 2) and the "football" (l. 9) played "Along the bank of the river". " (l. 10). The other speaker responds to the dead man's questions with a partially abrasive tone, as can be interpreted in lines 7 and 8 in which ...... middle of paper ...... he there is a certain inconstancy in it. It must be said in conclusion, if these works do indeed reflect Housman's "deep thoughts", that his sexuality combined with his philosophy of love culminates in an intensely masochistic lifestyle. the guilt that is obviously associated with the speaker of "Does My Team Plow" deciding to take his deceased friend's sweetheart In poem XXII, the speaker relays the contentment he finds in the emotions. mutual love between him and the redcoat, but at the same time XXVII relays the frustrations ultimately found in being alone. Investing such emotional intensity only to knowingly find unshared perspectives manifests as hope personified in the. two poems that speak of experiences of intimate gratification and internal content. Works Cited Bayley, John. Poems by Housman. Clarendon's Press, Oxford. 1992.Hoagwood, Terrence Allen. AE Housman revisited. Twayne Publishers, NY 1995. Housman, AE A Boy from Shropshire. Ed. Stanley Appelbaum. General Publishing Co., Ltd., Toronto. 1990. Scott-Kilvert, Ian. AE Housman: Writers and their Work No. 69. Longmans, Green and Co., London. 1965.