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 ( 1896 )

* 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

Crown Green Bowls is very popular mostly in the North of England but also in Wales, West Midlands and Shropshire.

* January 14 – Heiress Lesley Whittle, 17, is kidnapped from her home in Shropshire, England by Donald Neilson.

** The Iron Bridge is erected across the River Severn in Shropshire, the world's first bridge built entirely of cast iron.

The Offa's Dyke Centre is a purpose-built information centre in the town of Knighton, situated on Offa's Dyke on the border between England ( Shropshire ) and Wales ( Powys ).

* Adams ' Grammar School in Shropshire, England is founded by William Adams.

Zutphen is also twinned with the English town Shrewsbury, in the Midlands county of Shropshire.

Ludlow is a market town in Shropshire, England close to the Welsh border and in the Welsh Marches.

With a population of around 10, 000, Ludlow is the largest town in South Shropshire and home to the southern area committee of Shropshire Council.

The western part of the town immediately south of the castle retains this name, and many writers assume it is Saxon in origin, and the suffix-ham occurs in Shropshire.

The town is close to Wales and also very close to the county border between Shropshire and Herefordshire.

It is a wool church and the largest in Shropshire.

Shrewsbury is the county town of Shropshire in the United Kingdom, founded c. 800.

Cadfael, the central character of the Cadfael Chronicles, is a Benedictine monk and herbalist at Shrewsbury Abbey in Shrewsbury, the county town of the English county of Shropshire.

Ironbridge is a settlement on the River Severn, at the heart of the Ironbridge Gorge, in Shropshire, England.

Morda is a village on the outskirts of the town of Oswestry, Shropshire, England, located near the border of England and Wales.

Until recently it was properly called the Llangollen Branch of the Shropshire Union Canal, though it is now known as the Llangollen Canal.

The Severn Valley Railway is a heritage railway in Shropshire and Worcestershire, England.

* The Berth, near Baschurch in Shropshire, is reputed to be a possible burial place.

Newport, Shropshire is in the borough of Telford and Wrekin, but is separate from Telford.

This is thought to be true because the techniques and vocabulary of regional dialect of the unknown author is that of Northwest Midlands, located between Shropshire and Lancashire.

It has been suggested that it is Celtic: certainly many major rivers in England show pre-Anglo-Saxon origins, such as the Ouse and Avon ; the same name appears in the ' Neen ', the former name of the river Rea in Shropshire, which is retained in the hamlet of Neen Savage.