In 1943, Anthony Chenevix-Trench, a classical scholar and future Head Master of Eton, was a prisoner of war working on the infamous Burma railway. He lost an eye, suffered kidney failure, and endured unimaginable hardship. Among other ways of retaining his sanity, he mentally translated a number of A. E. Housman’s poems in A Shropshire Lad (1896) into Latin, including a version of what is possibly Housman’s best-known poem:

Into my heart an air that kills

From yon far country blows:

What are those blue remembered hills,

What spires, what farms are those?

That is the land of lost content,

I see it shining plain,

The happy highways where I went

And cannot come again.

Peter Parker, from whose new book Housman Country this anecdote is taken, explains that the air “kills” because it comes from “an irrecoverable past”:

The moment when this landscape comes into focus and can be identified is precisely the same moment that it is gone for ever. . . . That is what true nostalgia comes down to: you may be able to recognise past happiness, but you cannot regain it.1

Housman might have agreed with Proust that the true paradises are those which we have lost.

Those “blue remembered hills” are not necessarily Shropshire, with which, in fact, Housman (1859–1936) had little personal connection. He was born in neighboring Worcestershire, and explained, “I had a sentimental feeling for Shropshire because