Mo ~ sorry to have shocked you. Wiki says of Housman & A Shropshire Lad, that tho he was a Worcestershire man by origin,

"The poems are pervaded by deep pessimism and preoccupation with death, without religious consolation. Housman wrote most of them while living in Highgate, London, before ever visiting that part of Shropshire (about thirty miles from his home), which he presented in an idealised pastoral light, as his 'land of lost content'." (Wiki article on A E Housman)

~Michael~