The landscape that moves me most in all the world is that of Shropshire and Herefordshire in England and the adjacent Welsh border country. I do not mean by this that it is the most beautiful landscape in the world; the world is so various in its beauty that such a judgment, as if landscapes were in a sporting league competing for a trophy, would be ridiculous. A man’s response to a landscape is determined at least as much by its mental associations for him as by its physical appearance; and I, though something of an aesthete in my approach to life, have become deeply (and quickly) attached even to hideous towns and the bleakest of outposts. Still, by any measure, the land between England and Wales is beautiful and relatively free of the effects of the aesthetic catastrophe for England and Wales that was the twentieth century. My wife, who is French, says categorically that the Wye is the most beautiful river in the world; and, though I know the judgment to be absurd, I agree with her completely.

A. E. Housman was the poet of Shropshire, of course, though he was actually born in neighboring Worcestershire and never lived in the county that he celebrated. Because I live in Shropshire when I am in England, the poems mean more to