A Shropshire Lad (The Great Poets)

Housman, A. E.

4.02

2,717 ratings by Goodreads

9781843794905: A Shropshire Lad (The Great Poets)

ISBN 10: 184379490X ISBN 13: 9781843794905

Publisher: Naxos Audio Books, 2011

Naxos AudioBooks continues its popular 'The Great Poets' series with A Shropshire Lad by A.E. Housman. Published at the author's own expense in 1896, after rejection from publishers, the collection contains a cycle of 63 poems. Despite exploring themes of lost love, obsession, pessimism and death, the poems touched English readers and became a bestseller during the Second Boer War and World War I. The collection, set in a half-imagined pastoral Shropshire, includes the well-known poems When I Was One-and-Twenty, To an Athlete Dying Young and Loveliest of Trees, the Cherry Now.

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About the Author:

A. E. Housman (1859-1936) was born in the English countryside and felt affection for it all his life. He worked as a clerk before becoming an esteemed Latin scholar, but it was the publication of this, his first book of poems, that would bring him lasting fame.

Review:

Housman is a high-water mark of British lyric poetry, and this fine production captures perfectly his strong, melodic beat and decisive rhyme, and his wonderful way with words. Samuel West's cultivated Midlands accent may not be specifically Shropshire, but his voice and reading are true to Housman who was not, after all, some rough Shropshire lad himself but an Oxford don. His Loveliest of Trees, the Cherry Now and To an Athlete Dying Young are beautifully rendered here. West, you feel, reads poetry as it should be read confidently, with ease and conviction, as if all the world spoke in meter and rhyme. --D.A.W., AudioFile Magazine

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