A Shropshire Lad

A. E. Housman paid to publish these sixty-three poems himself in 1896, and sales were slow at first. Then they were not. The Shropshire of the title is half invented, a county Housman knew mainly from a distance: cherry blossom, Ludlow fairs, and lads who enlist and do not come back. The verses are short, plain, and hard. Youth passes, love fails, the rope and the recruiting sergeant wait their turn. Soldiers carried the book into the trenches of the First World War, where it read less like pastoral than like prophecy, and generations of schoolboys learned “Loveliest of trees, the cherry now” without quite noticing how bleak the rest of it was. Grab the free PDF or EPUB edition.