Classical Poetry PDF EPUB Audio

A Shropshire Lad

First published: 1896
Pages: 59

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Read by clarinetcarrot · 1 h 7 min · 4 parts

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Introduction
4:53
Poems I - XX
18:38
Poems XXI - XL
18:41
Poems XLI - LXIII
24:53

A Shropshire Lad (1919) is a public domain work.

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About this book

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.

About the author

A. E. Housman

A. E. Housman (1859-1936) was an English classical scholar of formidable reputation, professor of Latin at Cambridge, who wrote a small body of spare, sorrowful verse on the side. He published only two collections in his lifetime, yet few English poets have been quoted more often.

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