Alfred Edward Housman was born in England in 1859. He entered Bromsgrove School at the age of eleven and won a scholarship to St John's College, Oxford in 1877. Heattended Oxford until 1881, at which time he failed his final exams and left the university without a degree. On the strength of a series of scholarly articles (writtenas he worked in the Patent Office in London), he became Professor of Latin at University College in 1892. In 1911, he was appointed Kennedy Professor of Latin at Cambridge University.
Housman only published two volumes of poetry during his lifetime: A Shropshire Lad, published in 1895 and which is reproduced in this site, and Last Poems, published in 1922. A third volume, More Poems, was published posthumously by his brother, Laurence Housman, in 1936. In addition to being a fine poet, Housman was also one of the great classical scholars of his time. He produced an edition of Manilius (5 vol., 1903-30), edited Juvenal (1905) and Lucan (1926), and wrote many other valuable works of scholarship.
Housman died on the 30th of April, 1936.