A. E. Housman's famous love-song to youth and rural life, accompanied by the striking illustrations of Agnes Miller Parker.
Alfred Edward Housman was born in 1859 in Worcestershire, adjacent to Shropshire. He studied classics at St John's College, Oxford. He failed to gain an Honours degree, and spent years in the Patent Office while studying 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. Dr David Butterfield is a classicist at Queen's College, Cambridge and the editor of the Housman Society Journal.