A. E. Housman

Alfred Edward Housman (1859–1936) was an English poet and classical scholar. Born in Worcestershire, he went to Oxford as a brilliant classicist and unaccountably failed his finals, spending the next ten years as a clerk in the Patent Office while publishing papers on Latin texts in his spare time. Professor of Latin at University College London from 1892 and at Cambridge from 1911, he devoted thirty years to a critical edition of the obscure poet Manilius. A Shropshire Lad, published at his own expense in 1896, and Last Poems in 1922 contain almost all his verse: short, stoical lyrics of young death and lost love whose plainness disguises great craft.