A Shropshire Lad
Sixty-three short poems about a young man leaving the countryside, the soldiers he meets, and the deaths that wait for them. Housman published the collection in 1896 and it sold slowly at first, then became one of the most popular books of poetry in English.
The poems are simple, ballad-like and deliberately limited in range. Their power comes from repetition and from the tension between the beauty of the landscape and the certainty of loss. Some readers find the pessimism monotonous; others find it exact. It is a book to read in one sitting.
Public-domain status
First published in 1896. In the United States, works published before 1930 are in the public domain. In the European Union the general term is the life of the author plus 70 years; A. E. Housman died in 1936, so this work has been free to republish there since 2007.
Read the text free
- Project Gutenberg, ebook no. 5720 — plain text, EPUB and Kindle, checked by us
- Internet Archive — scanned editions and free audiobooks
- Open Library — edition history and borrowable copies
Keep reading
- Leaves of Grass — Walt Whitman, 1855
- The Canterbury Tales — Geoffrey Chaucer, 1400
- Troilus and Criseyde — Geoffrey Chaucer, 1385
- Childe Harold's Pilgrimage — Lord Byron, 1812
- Reading lists — 19 ways through the collection
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