A Shropshire Lad

In 1896, the high point of what has been variously called "the yellow 'nineties" and "the Beardsley period," Victorian poetry was at a low ebb. Alfred, Lord Tennyson and Robert Browning were both dead; Algernon Charles Swinburne had long since retired to Putney. The Pre-Raphaelite movement had subsided. Thomas Hardy was still known only as a novelist. The minor poets seemed stereotyped into two groups: those who, like Oscar Wilde, produced "Swinburne and water" and those who wrote frail imitations of the French of Paul Verlaine. The only new and original talent was that of Rudyard Kipling, who had already published his two most famous volumes. Yet despite Kipling's vigor, the spirit of the age was best represented by The Yellow Book and Aubrey Beardsley's illustrations for Alexander Pope's The Rape of the Lock (1712). It was in this atmosphere of "purple patches and fine phrases" that there appeared A Shropshire Lad, a slender volume containing sixty-three short poems-some only eight lines long-written by the Professor of Latin at University College, London.