'A Shropshire Lad' - A. E. Housman. Radio Play/Documentary.

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Originally a play for radio including excerpts from one of the most famous published cycles of poems ever written
Originally broadcast on BBC Radio C. 2007.

A Shropshire Lad is a collection of sixty-three poems by the English poet Alfred Edward Housman, published in 1896. Selling slowly at first, it then rapidly grew in popularity, particularly among young readers. Composers began setting the poems to music less than ten years after their first appearance,
The poems were to have particular resonance for the young men going to France to fight during the First World War. Many took a pocket-sized volume of the book along with them and took much comfort from the verse.

Alfred Edward Housman 1859 – 1936. An English classical scholar and poet. After an initially poor performance while at university, he took employment as a clerk in London and established his academic reputation by publishing as a private scholar at first. Later Housman was appointed Professor of Latin at University College London and then at the University of Cambridge. He is now acknowledged as one of the foremost classicists of his age and has been ranked as one of the greatest scholars at any time. His editions of Juvenal, Manilius and Lucan are still considered authoritative.

In 1896 he emerged as a poet with A Shropshire Lad, a cycle in which he poses as an unsophisticated and melancholy youth. After a slow start, this captured the imagination of young readers, its preoccupation with early death appealing to them especially during times of war. In 1922 his Last Poems added to his reputation, which was further enhanced by the large number of song settings drawn from these collections. Following his death, further poems from his notebooks were published by his brother, Laurence. It was then too, though Housman had made no admission himself, that his sexual orientation began to be questioned.

On this video accompanying the original broadcast material, the images generally attempt to follow the text. The objective was to provide some visual context to the extracts. This includes reflections of the First World War, during which these poignant poems meant so much to those innocent and brave young men many of whom would never return to their own beloved country.

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