Who was the narrator of the collection of poems A Shropshire Lad?

A Shropshire Lad by Alfred Edward (A. E.) Housman (1859-1936) is a collection of sixty-three poems first published in England in 1896. Most of the poems in the collection were written around 1895, during the time that Housman was a professor of Latin at University College London, a position which he was offered in 1892. He published another collection of poems, Last Poems, in 1922. After his death, his brother, Laurence, published his unpublished poems in More Poems (1936) and Collected Poems (1939).
Housman was a well-regarded classical scholar who specialized in analyzing the works of writers including Juvenal, Horace, Propertius, and Ovid, as well as playwrights such as Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles.
The poems in the collection are relatively short; some are as brief as two stanzas. Some of the poems have individual titles, such as To An Athlete Dying Young, but most of the poems don't have titles and are simply known by the first line of the poem, such as When I Was One-and-Twenty.
The narrator of the poems in A Shropshire Lad is considered by some scholars to be A. E. Housman himself, who seems to speak, at times, through a young man named Terence who is addressed directly by name in two of the poems, VIII and LXII.
Terence is sometimes referred to in articles and books about A Shropshire Lad as "Terence Hearsay." This full name doesn't appear in the poems themselves but comes from a title for A Shropshire Lad that Housman had previously considered, The Poems of Terence Hearsay.
The poems reflect Housman's own somewhat pessimistic attitude towards life and his preoccupation with death. His mother died just before his twelfth birthday. He was away from his family and living with friends, so he was unable to attend the funeral. A close friend and companion of his, Adalbert Jackson, died in 1892, and his father, Edward, died in 1894, just a year before many of the poems in the collection were written.
A number of the poems are considered to be autobiographical—particularly the poems which deal with death and lost love. The consistency of viewpoint and the development of the character of Terence throughout the poems—from the youthful Loveliest Of Trees, The Cherry Now, the second poem in A Shropshire Lad, to a considerably more mature Terence, This Is Stupid Stuff, the second-to-last poem in the collection—also lends support to the idea that Housman himself is the narrator of the poems.