A. E. Housman (Poet to Poet: An Essential Choice of Classic Verse)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0571207057 ISBN 13: 9780571207053

Publisher: Faber & Faber, 2002

Poetry Selected and with an Introduction by Alan Hollinghurst.

Alan Hollinghurst called A. E. Housman's A Shropshire Lad "the most vital English poetry collection of the 1890s and perhaps of the whole period from the death of Tennyson until Hardy's Satire of Circumstances." Drawing heavily on this volume, Hollinghurst gathers here a resonant collection of verse from Housman's entire oeuvre that, with its emphasis on the inevitable decay of youth and beauty and on the touching bonds of male friendship, was anthemic for the generation that went to war in 1914.

About the Author:

Alan Hollinghurst is the author of three novels, The Swimming-Pool Library, The Folding Star, and The Spell.

Review:

"Housman’s singular vision seized hold of the English imagination, inspiring not just a literary following but a generation of composers, like George Butterworth and Ralph Vaughan Williams, who sought to do musically what Housman had done with verse: to create a new and authentically English kind of song."
—New Yorker