Shropshire: A Place of Imagined Sexual Contentment Published in 1869, A. E. Housman's A Shropshire Lad is one of the most socially acclaimed collections of Victorian English poetry. This period of British history, however, is revealed, by judicial attention (the Criminal Law Amendment of 1885), to be in conflict with Housman's internal conflicts concerning the homoerotic tendencies he discovered in his admiration for fellow Oxford student Moses Jackson. Housman, unlike other English literary figures such as Oscar Wilde and Thomas Hardy, was not an artist who felt it necessary to directly confront Britain with any political dissent imposed by his works. Instead, “for Housman self-discovery was so disturbing and disconcerting that poetry became a way of unraveling it” (Bayley 44). The county of Shropshire is central to much of his poetry, but is employed simply as "a personification of the writer's memories, dreams, and affections"; meanwhile, Housman's central character is one "who could be both himself and not himself" (Scott-Kilvert 26). In what Housman himself considered one of his best poems, “XXVII: My Crew Is Plowing,” the focus is on a conversation between a dead man and one of his friends from his previous life (Housman 18). "XXII: The road resounds with the tread of the soldiers;" meanwhile, he expresses an emotional amazement discovered in the eyes of a passing soldier (Housman 15). Both the ambiguous quality of the dead man's last question (18 ll. 25-26) in poem XXVII and the nature of the chance encounter in XXII exemplify the subtle undercurrent of Housman's enigmatic sexuality. “My Crew Is Plowing” is in the form of the “primitive ballad meters, which Housman revived,” and primarily “employed for a poetry not of action but of introspection” (Scott-Kilvert 25). The piece begins with the dead man's questions about such trivialities as his "team" (l. 1) that he "led" (l. 2), and the "football" (l. 9) played "along the riverbank." " (l. 10). The other interlocutor responds to the dead man's questions with a partially abrasive tone, as can be interpreted from lines 7-8 in which... in the center of the sheet... there is a certain volubility. It must be said in conclusion, if these works do indeed reflect Housman's "thoughts of the heart", that his sexuality combined with his philosophy of love culminates in an intensely masochistic lifestyle. This is reflected in the guilt obviously associated with 'speaker of "My Crew Is Plowing" who decides to get his dead friend's girlfriend In poem XXII the speaker conveys the contentment he finds in the mutual emotions of love between him and the redcoat, but at the same time XXVII conveys the frustrations that ultimately lie in being alone. Investing such emotional intensity only to knowingly find unrequited prospects manifests as hope personified in both poems that speak to experiences of intimate gratification and internal content. Works Cited Bayley, John. Housman Poems. Clarendon's Press, Oxford. 1992.Hoagwood, Terrence Allen. A. E. Housman revisited. Twayne Publishers, NY 1995.Housman, A.E. A Shropshire Lad. Ed. Stanley Appelbaum. General Publishing Co., Ltd., Toronto. 1990.Scott-Kilvert, Ian. AE Housman: Writers and Their Work n. 69. Longmans, Green and Co., London. 1965.