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PENGUIN CLASSICS

A SHROPSHIRE LAD AND OTHER POEMS

A. E. HOUSMAN was born in 1859, the eldest son of a Worcestershire solicitor. He was educated at Bromsgrove School and won a scholarship to St John’s College, Oxford. He gained first-class honours in Classical Moderations, his first public examination at Oxford, but then failed in Greats, the Final School, and so left Oxford without a degree. From 1882 he worked for ten years as a clerk in Her Majesty’s Patent Office, proving himself by the publications of his leisure hours a superb scholar in Latin and Greek. In 1892 he was appointed Professor of Latin at University College, London. He was to publish editions of Manilius (1903–30), Juvenal (1905) and Lucan (1926), as well as magisterial papers on a range of classical authors, with the focus particularly on questions of principle, fact and tact within textual scholarship. He became Professor of Latin at Cambridge in 1911 and died there in 1936.

His scholarship drew admiration and fear; his poetry, love and fame. He published his first book of poems, A Shropshire Lad, in 1896 and followed it only with Last Poems in 1922. Fortunately his brother, Laurence Housman, permitted the posthumous publication of More Poems and Additional Poems. Three years before Housman died he gave delight and offence with his vivid, lucid lecture The Name and Nature of Poetry. He declined honours, including the Order of Merit.

ARCHIE BURNETT is Co-director of the Editorial Institute and Professor of English at Boston University.

His scholarly editions of the poems and the letters of A. E. Housman have been published by Oxford University Press, and he is currently preparing a complete edition, with commentary, of the poems of Philip Larkin for Faber.

NICK LAIRD was born in 1975 in County Tyrone, Northern Ireland. He was a scholar at Cambridge University and spent a year at Harvard as a visiting fellow. He also worked for several years as a litigator and arbitration lawyer in London and Warsaw. The author of the poetry collections To a Fault and On Purpose, he has received several prestigious awards for both poetry and fiction, including the 2005 Rooney Prize for Irish Literature and the Ireland Chair of Poetry Award. His first novel, Utterly Monkey, won the Betty Trask Prize for Best First Novel and was shortlisted for the Irish Novel of the Year and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. His second novel, Glover’s Mistake, was published in 2009.

A Shropshire Lad and Other Poems

The Collected Poems of A. E. Housman

Edited by ARCHIE BURNETT

with an Introduction by NICK LAIRD

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