A Shropshire Lad

In sixty-three short lyrics, simple in form and haunting in effect, A. E. Housman speaks through a young man of the Shropshire countryside: of spring blossom and summer fairs, love and friendship, and above all of the brevity of youth, the soldiers who march away and do not return, and the young men who die before their time. 'Loveliest of trees, the cherry now / Is hung with bloom along the bough.'

Housman (1859–1936), a brilliant classical scholar who taught Latin in London and later at Cambridge, published the book at his own expense in 1896. Slow to sell at first, it became enormously popular, especially during the First World War, and many of its poems were set to music. Compare Wilfred Owen's Poems.