Books: More of the Lad

THE MANUSCRIPT POEMS OF A. E. HOUSMAN (146 pp.)—Edited by Tom Burns Haber—University of Minnesota Press ($4.50).

A. E. Housman once said that he had to blot poetry out of his mind while shaving because the thought of a fine line made his skin bristle and stopped his razor short. Housman put most of his own skin-prickling stanzas into A Shropshire Lad ("When I was one and twenty"), published in 1896 at his own expense when he was seven and thirty. This collection of unpublished poems will halt no razors. They are shavings of another sort, poetic chips and fragments from four...