The sixty-three short poems that constitute A Shropshire Lad conjure a pastoral countryside that is remembered sentimentally by the young men who express a melancholy lament for the lost time of happy youth, the transience and unfairness of love, the disillusionment of shattered ideals, and the grim possibility of an early death in the service of the British Crown.  There is no single Shropshire Lad per se, and Shropshire itself, although an actual place, is largely an imagined idyll and literary construct.  Published in 1896, the book gradually gained popularity during the Second Boer War and then the First World War, owing to the themes of military action and dying young.  Poet A. E. Houseman targeted the poems to a young male readership, and the publisher kept prices low enough to issue small,inexpensive pocket editions which were carried by many British soldiers.  All but seven of the poems have been set to music, twelve more than ten times. Composers are naturally attracted to the mix of emotional feeling, lyrical style, and folksy subject matter.  W. H. Auden wrote that “no other poet seemed so perfectly to express the sensibility of a male adolescent” of his generation. George Orwell recollected that “these were the poems which I and my contemporaries used to recite to ourselves, over and over.”