Warning against the intellectual frivolity of poetry, the classics scholar Alfred Edward Housman (March 26, 1859 – April 30, 1936) argued the meaning of poetry should be simple, not overloaded with unlike things:

I said that the legitimate meanings of the word poetry were themselves so many as to embarrass the discussion of its nature. All the more reason why we should not confound confusion worse by wresting the term to licentious use and affixing it either to dissimilar things already provided with names of their own, or to new things for which new names should be invented. There was a whole age of English in which the place of poetry was usurped by something very different which possessed the proper and specific name of wit: wit not in its modern sense, but as defined by Johnson, 'a combination of dissimilar images, or discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike'. Such discoveries are no more poetical than anagrams; such pleasure as they give is purely intellectual and is intellectually frivolous.
From A. E. Housman's "The Name and Nature of Poetry"

A surprise, perhaps, that one of the world's greatest classics scholar A. E. Housman, would be a proponent of humble, unadorned verse. Housman taught at Cambridge University from 1911 until he died in 1936. His poetry was less well-known (and received less critical acclaim) than his translations, and he only lectured on poetry once.

Composer George Butterworth's "Songs based on Housman’s "A Shropshire Lad" written in 1909-1911. Learn more.

Housman's poignant few published poems and his lecture on the nature of poetry are included in this collection: A Shropshire Lad and Other Poems.

Now dreary dawns the eastern light

Now dreary dawns the eastern light,
And fall of eve is drear,
And cold the poor man lies at night,
And so goes out the year.
Little is the luck I've had,
And oh, 'tis comfort small
To think that many another lad
Has had no luck at all.

Housman's poetry is oft-criticized as sentimental due to its plain-spokenness. And something of the overly-patriotic note sounded in poems like "The Recruit."

Leave your home behind, lad, And reach your friends your hand,
And go, and luck go with you
While Ludlow tower shall stand
On, come you home of Sunday
When Ludlow streets are still
And Ludlow bells are calling
To farm and lane and mill,
Or come you home of Monday
When Ludlow market hums
And Ludlow chimes are playing
'The conquering hero comes,'~
Or come you home a hero,
Or come not home at all,
The lads you leave will mind you
Till ludlow tower shall fall. [...]

Compare Housman's soft patriotism and hometown glory with the more resolute and modern verse of Wilfred Owen's War Poems, which shamed those who ignored death.

Yet there is no denying the emotional force of Housman's work, grounded in sorrow and longing. Housman, like his Romantic predecessors, believed poetry sprung from a by-product of emotions of life. He wrote:

The production of poetry, in its first stage, is less an active than a passive and involuntary process; and if I were obliged, not to define poetry, but to name the class of things to which it belongs, I should call it a secretion; weather a natural secretion, like turpentine in the fir, or a morbid secretion, like the pearl in the oyster.
From A. E. Housman's "The Name and Nature of Poetry"

For Housman, that life-induced emotion was torrential. In his early years, he attended Oxford only to fail out after he fell "irreparably in love" with Moses Jackson, a heterosexual. Housman lived a life of unreturned love and a lifetime of longing for the impossible, a returned passion.

You smile upon your friend to-day, To-day his ills are over;
You harken to the lover's say,
and happy is the lover.
'Tis late to harken, late to smile,
But better late than never:
I shall have lived a little while
Before I die for ever.
From "A Shropshire Lad"

"The Hay Wain" by English naturalist painter John Constable, 1821. Learn more.

Housman's poems that include love or lovers often end in bitterness, death, and disappointment. All written from the angle of his most famous poem and character, the Shropshire lad, who is seemingly the youthful Housman:

Along the field as we came by A year ago, my love and I,
The aspen over stile and stone
was talking to itself alone.
'Oh who are these that kiss and pass?
A country lover and his lass;
Two lovers looking to be wed;
And time shall put them both to bed,
But she shall lie with earth above,
And he beside another love.'
From "A Shropshire Lad"

Housman published only two poetry collections, although further collections were published posthumously. His talent crested during periods of deep pain, the loss of Moses Jackson first to India and then to death.

The time you won your town the race We chaired you through the market-place;
Man and boy stood cheering by,
And home we brought you shoulder-high.
To-day, the road all runners come,
Shoulder-high we bring you home,
And set you at your threshold down,
Townsman of a stiller town. [...]
From "To an Athlete Dying Young"

Butterworth was an avid collector of British folk songs, and his style for this collection is influenced by that music. Listen here.

Like Housman's contemporary T.S. Eliot, who wrote "The Waste Land" amid a failed marriage, Housman wrote from intense knowledge gained through feelings.

A. E. Housman. Photograph by E. O. Hoppé.

Through his unending and deeply buried emotional pain, Housman finds an ear for truth. "A Shropshire Lad," his most famous poem, is about longing to return to an innocent place before death inevitably claims us.

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.
Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.
From "A Shropshire Lad"

John Constable's "Hampstead Heath with a Rainbow," 1836, is one of Constable's many Heath pictures that captured the value of the space as a London escape. Constable's canvases beautified the same space and time as Housman's verse. Learn more.

Accompany Housman's unique ballads with Leonard Cohen's late-in-life poetry collection and musings on the soulful longing that echoes Housman's.

The English countryside is a nurturing soil of prose and poetry because it turns memory into sediment. Dig into Robert Macfarlane's The Old Ways, a study of the paths we make and what they make of us (Housman was a noted ambler), or Romantic poet John Clare's celebration of the land and poetic bereavement at its irreversible change. And compare Housman to equally plain-spoken and sentimental Laurie Lee's exquisite reminiscences of childhood: Cider with Rosie, I Can't Stay Long, and A Village Christmas.