A Shropshire Lad

Description

Evocative of the blue remembered hills of his youth, Alfred Edward Housmans A Shropshire Lad is a collection of sixty-three poems of extraordinary beauty and feeling. Set in a semi-imaginary pastoral Shropshire, Housmans verse considers the helplessness of man, the fragility of life and the terrible effects of war, against the background of an achingly beautiful countryside.

Inspirational for generations of readers, A Shropshire Lad, with its sweeping themes of youth and love, has found its way into the canon of English folksong and has been set to music by composers George Butterworth, John Ireland and Ralph Vaughan Williams.

This beautiful Macmillan Collectors Library edition of A. E. Housman’s A Shropshire Lad features the superb wood engravings of the Vorticist artist and illustrator Agnes Miller Parker, and is accompanied by an afterword by Dr David Butterfield, Editor of the Housman Society Journal.

Designed to appeal to the booklover, the Macmillan Collectors Library is a series of beautiful gift editions of much loved classic titles. Macmillan Collectors Library are books to love and treasure.

Author Information

Alfred Edward Housman was born in 1859 in Worcestershire, adjacent to Shropshire. He studied classics at St John’s College, Oxford. He failed to gain an Honours degree, and spent years in the Patent Office while studying independently. A series of brilliant academic articles secured him the Professorship of Latin at London University in 1892 and he went on the become Kennedy Professor of Latin at Cambridge and a Fellow of Trinity College. Housman’s first and most famous volume of poetry was A Shropshire Lad (1896), which was followed by several other collections. He died in Cambridge in 1936.
Dr David Butterfield is a classicist at Queen’s College, Cambridge and the editor of the Housman Society Journal.