A Shropshire Lad
Written by A. E. Housman
Narrated by Richard Mitchley, Ghizela Rowe and Jake Urry
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About this audiobook
This now seminal collection of sixty-three poems was originally self-published by Housman in 1896 after rejections from publishers. None saw its potential.
Housman, it is said, originally wanted to name the book, The Poems of Terence Hearsay, referring to a character within, but changed the title to A Shropshire Lad at the suggestion of a colleague.
The poems were mainly written in 1895 whilst Housman was living in Byron Cottage in Highgate. The book sold slowly. The initial print run of 500 took two years to sell through. However by 1911 annual sales were in the order of 13,500 copies and, during World War I, the book accompanied many young men into the trenches.
It thereafter became a cultural icon, remembering a gentler time, a better time.
Housman did confess that much of what he had written about, especially in terms of terrain and geography was assumed rather than known. But such poetic licence is easily set aside when the finished work is read and admired.?
As George Orwell later remembered, "these were the poems which I and my contemporaries used to recite to ourselves, over and over, in a kind of ecstasy".
A. E. Housman
Alfred Edward Housman (1859-1936) was born and brought up in the Bromsgrove region of Worcestershire, adjacent to Shropshire, and was educated locally and at St John's College, Oxford. Though he was a fine scholar, he failed to gin an Honours degree, and spent some years in the Patent Office in London. A series of brilliant academic articles secured him the Professorship of Latin at London University and he went on the become Kennedy Professor of Latin at Cambridge and a Fellow of Trinity College. Most famous for A Shropshire Lad (1896), Last Poems was published in 1922, More Poems appeared posthumously and Collected Poems in 1939.
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