Collected Poems of A. E. Housman: With a Chapter from Twenty-Four Portraits By William Rothenstein

Doomed lads, borrowed summers, and a Shropshire the poet hardly knew: A. E. Housman's four sequences of verse, with his translations, brought together in a single volume.

First published in 1939, three years after Housman's death, Collected Poems gathers A Shropshire Lad (1896), Last Poems (1922), the posthumous More Poems that his brother Laurence saw into print, a group of additional pieces, and a short run of translations.

Alfred Edward Housman (1859–1936) was Kennedy Professor of Latin at Cambridge and one of the most formidable classical scholars of his generation, yet he published only two thin collections of verse in his lifetime and set little store by the fame they won him. A Shropshire Lad was turned down by Macmillan and printed at his own expense; it sold slowly at first, then found the young readers who carried it through the trenches and have kept it in print ever since.

This edition also carries William Rothenstein's chapter on Housman from Twenty-Four Portraits (1920) – a drawing made from life, with a short appreciation of the poetry beside it.