A. E. Housman
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"Alfred Edward Housman", usually known as "A. E. Housman", was an English people/English classics/classical scholar and poet, best known to the general public for his cycle of poems A Shropshire Lad. Lyrical and almost epigrammatic in form, the poems wistfully evoke the dooms and disappointments of youth in the English countryside [http://www.poetryarchive.org/poet/e-housman]. Their beauty, simplicity and distinctive imagery appealed strongly to late Victorian era/Victorian and Edwardian period/Edwardian taste, and to many early 20th-century English composers (beginning with Arthur Somervell) both before and after the First World War. Through their song-settings, the poems became closely associated with that era, and with Shropshire itself.

Housman was one of the foremost classicists of his age and has been ranked as one of the greatest scholars who ever lived. He established his reputation publishing as a private scholar and, on the strength and quality of his work, was appointed Professor of Latin at University College London and then at University of Cambridge/Cambridge. His editions of Juvenal, Marcus Manilius/Manilius and Marcus Annaeus Lucanus/Lucan are still considered authoritative.

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And malt does more than Milton can To justify God's ways to man.

And silence sounds no worse than cheers / After death has stopped the ears.

Great literature should do some good to the reader: must quicken his perception though dull, and sharpen his discrimination though blunt, and mellow the rawness of his personal opinions.

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now / Is hung with bloom along the bough.

In every American there is an air of incorrigible innocence, which seems to conceal a diabolical cunning.

Even when poetry has a meaning, as it usually has, it may be inadvisable to draw it out... Perfect understanding will sometimes almost extinguish pleasure.

About the woodlands I will go / To see the cherry hung with snow.

The fairies break their dances / And leave the printed lawn.

Here dead lie we because we did not choose to live and shame the land from which we sprung. Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose; but young men think it is, and we were young.

Who made the world I cannot tell; 'Tis made, and here am I in hell. My hand, though now my knuckles bleed, I never soiled with such a deed.

White in the moon the long road lies.

Clay lies still, but blood's a rover; / Breath's a ware that will not keep. / Up, lad; when the journey's over / There'll be time enough for sleep.