Alfred Edward Housman (; 26 March 1859 – 30 April 1936 ), usually known as A. E. Housman, was an English classical scholar and poet, best known to the general public for his cycle of poems A Shropshire Lad.

The cherry tree, on the right, was planted in his memory ( see A Shropshire Lad, II ).

During his years in London, A. E. Housman completed A Shropshire Lad, a cycle of 63 poems.

A Shropshire Lad has been in print continuously since May 1896.

These later poems, mostly written before 1910, show a greater variety of subject and form than those in A Shropshire Lad but lack the consistency of his previously published work.

Sparrow himself adds, " How difficult it is to achieve a satisfactory analysis may be judged by considering the last poem in A Shropshire Lad.

Despite the conservative nature of the times, Housman, as distinct from the prudence of his public life, was quite open in his poetry, and especially his A Shropshire Lad, about his deeper sympathies.

Housman's poetry, especially A Shropshire Lad, provided texts for a significant number of British, and in particular English, composers in the first half of the 20th century.

The first was probably the cycle A Shropshire Lad set by Arthur Somervell in 1904, who had begun to develop the concept of the English song-cycle in his version of Tennyson's Maud a little previously.

Between 1909 and 1911 George Butterworth produced settings in two collections or cycles, as Six Songs from A Shropshire Lad, and Bredon Hill and other songs.

He also wrote an orchestral tone poem on A Shropshire Lad ( first performed at Leeds Festival under Arthur Nikisch in 1912 ).

Blue Remembered Hills, a television play by Dennis Potter, takes its title from " Into My Heart an Air That Kills " from A Shropshire Lad, the cycle also providing the name for the James Bond film Die Another Day: " But since the man that runs away / Lives to die another day ".

* A Shropshire Lad: Authorized Edition: Henry Holt and Company ( 1924 )

A. E. Housman refers to the ' Greek Lad ', Narcissus, in his poem Look not in my Eyes from A Shropshire Lad set to music by several English composers including George Butterworth.

* A. E. Housman published A Shropshire Lad in 1896.

A Shropshire Lad.

Housman's A Shropshire Lad, in which the poet likens reading dark poems to King Mithridates ' self-immunization against poisons ), he realizes that Urquhart laced an omelette with arsenic and shared it with Boyes after having built up an immunity to the poison with small doses over a long period.

Housman's A Shropshire Lad, referring to King Mithridates VI of Pontus, who supposedly built tolerance against a whole range of deadly poisons by the same method ( known as Mithridatism ) as Urquhart.

West has recorded over fifty audiobooks, among which are the Shakespeare plays All's Well That Ends Well, Coriolanus, Henry V, The Merchant of Venice, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Much Ado About Nothing and Richard II, the Wind on Fire trilogy by William Nicholson ( The Wind Singer, Slaves of the Mastery and Firesong ), the Arthur trilogy by Kevin Crossley-Holland ( The Seeing Stone, At the Crossing Places and King of the Middle March ), five books by Sebastian Faulks ( Charlotte Gray, Birdsong, The Girl at the Lion d ' Or, Human Traces and A Possible Life ), four by Michael Ridpath ( Trading Reality, Final Venture, Free to Trade, and The Marketmaker ), two by George Orwell ( Nineteen Eighty-Four and Homage to Catalonia ), two by Mary Wesley ( An Imaginative Experience and Part of the Furniture ), two by Robert Goddard ( Closed Circle and In Pale Battalions ) and several compilations of poetry ( Realms of Gold: Letters and Poems of John Keats, Bright Star, The Collected Works of Shelley, Seven Ages, Great Narrative Poems of the Romantic Age and A Shropshire Lad ).

Samuel West has received seven AudioFile Earphones Awards for his narration: The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham ( 1996 ), Peter Pan by J. M. Barrie ( 1997 ), Charlotte Gray by Sebastian Faulks ( 1999 ), The Way I Found Her by Rose Tremain ( 2000 ), The Swimming Pool Library by Alan Hollinghurst ( 2007 ), Faust by Goethe ( 2011 ) and A Shropshire Lad by A. E. Housman ( 2011 ).

* George Butterworth – A Shropshire Lad

John Betjeman's poem " A Shropshire Lad " ( 1940 ) commemorates the death of Captain Webb, portraying his ghost swimming back along the canal to Dawley.

* Alfred Edward Housman-A Shropshire Lad

The patent creating him Baron Leighton, of Stretton in the County of Shropshire, was issued on 24 January 1896 ; Leighton died the next day of angina pectoris.

A Shropshire Lad was first published in 1896 at Housman's own expense after several publishers had turned it down, much to the surprise of his colleagues and students.

Her parents moved the family again in Shropshire, north to Stanton upon Hine Heath in 1896, before settling at Meole Brace, now on the outskirts of Shrewsbury, in 1902.

The Latin motto of " Floreat Salopia " ( may Shropshire flourish ) was originally used by the borough of Shrewsbury, and was adopted in 1896 by Salop ( or Shropshire ) County Council when they received a grant of a coat of arms.

The hill is immortalised in poem 21 of A. E. Housman's 1896 anthology A Shropshire Lad.

Cricket features, albeit briefly, in this late-Victorian poet's most famous collection of somewhat gloomy poems, " A Shropshire Lad ", published in 1896 and never out-of-print since then.

Apart from his political career Lord Bradford was a Deputy Lieutenant of Staffordshire and served as Lord-Lieutenant of Shropshire between 1875 and 1896.

The club then had spells in the Shropshire League, Birmingham League and North Staffordshire League up to the turn of the century, and moved to their present Marston Road home in 1896.