Housman was a leamed, not to say scholarly, poet who none the less achieved wide popularity in his own lifetime. By 1940 over 130,000 copies of A Shropshire Lad had been printed. His poems answer to traditional expectations: they deal in large themes such as love, loss and death; they rhyme and scan and are tuneful - and are therefore easy to memonse. Although much of his vocabulary is short and plain he also makes copious use of heightened, semi-archaic phras-ing that carries echoes of earlier poets:...

Housman's melodic and memorable poems have been popular for over a century. He writes typically of lost love, of the brevity of happiness, of young soldiers doomed to die.Admirers have found his work elegant and resonant;detractors have thought much of it mannered and glib. But Housman speaks with two voices: the smooth texts conceal a dark sub-text. This tormented and secretive man wrote poems alive with indirect self-disclosure.

Introduction

Selected Bibliography

A Shropshire Lad

Last Poems

More Poems

Additianal Poems

Translations

Notes

Index of First Lines

Index of Tided Poems