A Shropshire Lad

Evocative of 'the blue remembered hills' of his youth, Alfred Edward Housman's A Shropshire Lad is a collection of sixty-three poems of extraordinary beauty and feeling. Set in a semi-imaginary pastoral Shropshire, Housman’s 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 Collector’s Library edition 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 Collector's Library is a series of beautiful gift editions of much loved classic titles. Macmillan Collector's Library are books to love and treasure.

Alfred Edward Housman was born in 1859 and brought up in the Bromsgrove region of Worcestershire, adjacent to Shropshire. He was educated locally and then studied classics at St John's College, Oxford. Although he was a fine scholar, he failed to gain an Honours degree, and spent some years in the Patent Office in London whilst continuing his studies 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 and was buried in his beloved Shropshire.