A Shropshire Lad and Other Poems: The Collected Poems of A.E. Housman (Penguin Classics) - Softcover

Housman, A.E.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140424741 ISBN 13: 9780140424744

Publisher: Penguin Classics, 2010

Synopsis

A.E. Housman was one of the best-loved poets of his day, and A Shropshire Lad and Other Poems is a collection of poems whose elegant simplicity of form belies their hidden complexities. This Penguin Classics edition is introduced by Nick Laird with revisions by Archie Burnett and an afterword by John Sparrow.

'What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?'

In this collection, A. E. Housman's poems, including'To an Athlete Dying Young', 'Loveliest of Trees, the Cherry Now' and 'When I Was One-and-Twenty', conjure up a potent and idyllic rural world imbued with a poignant sense of loss and sadness. Their scope is wide - ranging from religious doubt and doomed love to intense nostalgia for the countryside and patriotic celebration of the life of the soldier - and they are made all the more memorable by their distinctive diction and perfectly modulated rhythm and sound. This volume brings together the works Housman published in his lifetime, A Shropshire Lad (1896) and Last Poems (1922), along with the posthumous selections More Poems and Additional Poems, and three translations of extracts from Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides 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. In his afterword, John Sparrow discusses Housman's methods of writing and melancholic temperament.

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

If you enjoyed A Shropshire Lad and Other Poems, you might like John Clare's Selected Poems, also available in Penguin Classics.

About this title

Review:

"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

About the Author:

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.

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Classics
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0140424741
• ISBN 13: 9780140424744
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288
• Editor: Laird Nick