A. E. Housman’s A Shropshire Lad (1896) is one of the most beloved poetry collections in English — sixty-three short lyric poems of a pastoral England already disappearing, haunted by the brevity of youth, the beauty of the natural world, and the inevitability of death. Spare, musical, and deeply felt, the poems draw on classical elegy and the English ballad tradition.
Housman self-published the collection after repeated rejections, and it eventually sold hundreds of thousands of copies. This free EPUB presents all sixty-three poems cleanly formatted and ready to read on any device.