1 hour 3 minutes
Some articles contain affiliate links (marked with an asterisk *). If you click on these links and purchase products, we will receive a small commission at no extra cost to you. Your support helps to keep this site running and to continue creating useful content. Thank you for your support!
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 the book became a best seller 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'.