A Shropshire Lad

Front Cover
Penguin Adult, Apr 2, 2009 - Fiction - 84 pages

This magical and poignant evocation of coming of age in the countryside describes lovers in secluded lanes, cricket and church bells, cherry trees hung with snow and woods full of bluebells. Yet in A Shropshire Lad the fields and hills are also places of loss and sorrow, where men die young or are sent far away to fight in foreign wars. Aching with longing for a vanished world, these exquisite verses are a meditation on the fleeting nature of love, youth and happiness.

Generations of inhabitants have helped shape the English countryside but it has profoundly shaped us too.It has provoked a huge variety of responses from artists, writers, musicians and people who live and work on the land as well as those who are travelling through it.English Journeys celebrates this long tradition with a series of twenty books on all aspects of the countryside, from stargazey pie and country churches, to man s relationship with nature and songs celebrating the patterns of the countryside (as well as ghosts and love-struck soldiers).

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About the author (2009)

A. E. Housman was born in Fockbury, Worcestershire, England on March 26, 1859. In 1877, he attended St. John's College, Oxford and received first class honours in classical moderations. He worked as clerk in the Patent Office in London for ten years. During this time he studied Greek and Roman classics intensively, and in 1892 was appointed professor of Latin at University College, London. In 1911 he became professor of Latin at Trinity College, Cambridge, a post he held until his death. He only published two volumes of poetry during his lifetime: A Shropshire Lad and Last Poems. He died on April 30, 1936. A third volume, More Poems, was released posthumously in 1936 by his brother as was an edition of Housman's Complete Poems in 1939.

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