A Shropshire Lad and Other Poems

Description

A wonderful collection from one of England’s best-loved poets

One of the most admired poets of his day, A.E. Housman wrote poems that conjure a potent and idyllic rural world imbued with a poignant sense of loss. Expressed in simple rhythms, they show a fine ear for the subtleties of meter and alliteration, and they touch on subjects ranging from religious doubt and doomed love to patriotic celebration of the soldier and intense nostalgia for the countryside. This volume brings together the works Housman published in his lifetime, A Shropshire Lad (1896) and Last Poems (1922), along with many posthumous selections and three translations of extracts from Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripedes that display his mastery of classical literature.

This edition has been revised by Archie Burnett and includes updated notes on the text and indexes of first lines and titles. It is introduced by Nick Laird and includes an afterword by John Sparrow. 

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1.700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout historyand across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

“Housman’s singular vision seized hold of the English imagination, inspiring not just a literary following but a generation of composers, like George Butterworth and Ralph Vaughan Williams, who sought to do musically what Housman had done with verse: to create a new and authentically English kind of song.”
—New Yorker

Alfred Edward Housman (March 26, 1859 – April 30, 1936), usually known as A.E. Housman, was an English poet and classical scholar, now best known for his cycle of poems A Shropshire Lad.

Nick Laird was born in 1975 in County Tyrone, Northern Ireland. He was a scholar at Cambridge University and spent a year at Harvard as a visiting fellow. He also worked for several years as a litigator and arbitration lawyer in London and Warsaw. The author of the poetry collections To A Fault (Faber/Norton) and On Purpose (Faber/Norton), he has received several prestigious awards for both poetry and fiction, including the 2005 Rooney Prize for Irish Literature and the Ireland Chair of Poetry Award. His first novel, Utterly Monkey (Fourth Estate/Harper Collins) won the Betty Trask Prize for best first novel and was shortlisted for Irish Novel of the Year and the Commonwealth Writers Prize. His second novel, Glover’s Mistake, was published by 4th Estate in the spring of 2009.

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