On the 90th anniversary of his death, Shropshire lad, Richard Uridge and Shropshire lass, Pele Cox, discuss the life and works of the poet, A E Housman.
They agree that his poetry is every bit as relevant today as when it was first written at the turn of the 20th century. And they discover that his best-selling A Shropshire Lad didn’t sell well initially – a lesson for budding poets everywhere.
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Poems
- More Poems XVI – How clear, how lovely bright
- A Shropshire Lad II – Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
- Last Poems XII – The laws of God. the laws of man
- A Shropshire Lad XIX – The time you won your town the race
Further reading
The Housman Society has a wonderful online resource for everything Alfred Edward. You could spend hours here.
And the BBC did a Great Lives on A E Housman on Radio 4 all the way back in 2008.
Queries and corrections
In a slip of the tongue we said that Housman taught at Oxford. It was, of course, Cambridge. Our apologies for the error. In our (admittedly rather weak) defence we’d point out that it’s easy to get one’s Oxbridges confused! We also intimated that the reason Housman “ploughed” (failed) his finals was because of some kind of mental breakdown. Certainly he was distracted, though, by what, the evidence isn’t clear.
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