Hello and welcome to Frank Skinner's poetry podcast.

This week I would like to talk about the poet A. E. Houseman.

I explain that siren a bit later on.

I'll explain that siren a bit later on. A houseman was born in Bromsgrove, Worcestershire in 1859 and he died in Cambridge in 1936.

What was he doing in Cambridge?

Well, he became an absolute top-end classic scholar,

very highly venerated. and a professor of Latin at Cambridge where one of his students was Enoch Powell always handy if you don't want to be the worst person in the

room to have such a student. If you look at A.E.

houseman's, it won't, the siren doesn't go off every time I say the name.

If you look at his headstone in Lodlow in Shropshire, the academic aspect of his life gets top billing, the top line

under his name, says Professor of Latin and fellow of Trinity College

Cambridge and then second billing author of a Shropshire lad.

And it is that collection of 63 poems

published in 1896, a Shropshire lad

that I want to talk about today.

It's kind of amazing that this grumpy old academic from Cambridge University I must say I'm calling houseman old but he was

only in his late 30s when a Shropshire lad was published published. It's just that, you know, gravitas always ages a man.

Anyway, this massive classics scholar and general difficult bloke.

I'll give you a quote.

This is actually from his obituary in the times where generally I would say

in obituries, punches are pulled.

But it says of, housemen, in that obituary,

...