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A Shropshire Lad
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Illustration of "The Lamb" from "Songs of Innocence" by William Blake, 1879. poem; poetry
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4:043 Dickinson, Emily: A Life of Letters, This is my letter to the world/That never wrote to me; I'll tell you how the Sun Rose/A Ribbon at a time; Hope is the thing with feathers/That perches in the soul
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Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) only confirmed photograph of Emily Dickinson. 1978 scan of a Daguerreotype. ca. 1847; in the Amherst College Archives. American poet. See Notes:
Poetry: First Lines
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A Shropshire Lad

poetry by Housman
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History

A Shropshire Lad, a collection of 63 poems by A.E. Housman, published in 1896. Housman’s lyrics express a Romantic pessimism in a clear, direct style. The poems of Heinrich Heine, the songs of William Shakespeare, and Scottish border ballads were Housman’s models, from which he learned to express emotion yet keep it at a certain distance. He assumed in his lyrics the persona of a farm labourer, and he set the poems in Shropshire, a West Midlands English county he had not yet visited when he began writing the poems. Among the most familiar of the poems are “To an Athlete Dying Young,” “With Rue My Heart Is Laden,” and “When I Was One and Twenty.”

This article was most recently revised and updated by Kathleen Kuiper.