A Shropshire Lad

poetry by Housman

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Article History

A Shropshire Lad, a collection of 63 poems by A.E. Housman, published in 1896. Housman’s lyrics express a Romantic pessimism in a clear, direct style. The poems of Heinrich Heine, the songs of William Shakespeare, and Scottish border ballads were Housman’s models, from which he learned to express emotion yet keep it at a certain distance. He assumed in his lyrics the persona of a farm labourer, and he set the poems in Shropshire, a West Midlands English county he had not yet visited when he began writing the poems. Among the most familiar of the poems are “To an Athlete Dying Young,” “With Rue My Heart Is Laden,” and “When I Was One and Twenty.”

This article was most recently revised and updated by Kathleen Kuiper.