Education
Housman formed strong friendships with two roommates, Moses Jackson and A. W. Pollard.
St John's College, Oxford
King Edward's School, Birmingham
Bromsgrove School
Housman formed strong friendships with two roommates, Moses Jackson and A. W. Pollard.
Works titled after Housman
Housman is the main character in the 1997 Tom Stoppard play The Invention of Love.
Many titles for novels and films have been drawn from Housman's poetry. The line "There's this to say for blood and breath,/ they give a man a taste for death" supplies the title for Peter O'Donnell's 1969 Modesty Blaise thriller, A Taste for Death, also the inspiration for P. D. James' 1986 crime novel, A Taste for Death, the seventh in her Adam Dalgliesh series. The last words of the poem "On Wenlock Edge" are used by Audrey R. Langer for the title of the 1989 novel Ashes Under Uricon. The Nobel Prize winning novelist Patrick White named his 1955 novel The Tree of Man after a line in A Shropshire Lad and Arthur C. Clarke's first novel, Against the Fall of Night, is taken from a work in Housman's More Poems. The 2009 novel Blood's a Rover by James Ellroy takes its title from Housman's poem "Reveille", and a line from Housman's poem XVI "How Clear, How Lovely Bright", was used for the title of the last Inspector Morse book The Remorseful Day by Colin Dexter. Blue Remembered Hills, a television play by Dennis Potter, takes its title from "Into My Heart an Air That Kills" from A Shropshire Lad, the cycle also providing the name for the James Bond film Die Another Day: "But since the man that runs away / Lives to die another day".
A Shropshire Lad (1896)
Last Poems: Henry Holt and Company (1922)
A Shropshire Lad: Authorized Edition: Henry Holt and Company (1924)
More Poems: Barclays Bank limited. (1936)
Collected Poems: Henry Holt and Company (1940)
Collected Poems (1939); the poems included in this volume but not the three above are known as Additional Poems. The Penguin Edition of 1956 includes an Introduction by John Sparrow.
Manuscript Poems: Eight Hundred Lines of Hitherto Un-collected Verse from the Author's Notebooks, educated Tom Burns Haber (1955)
Is My Team Ploughing
Unkind to Unicorns: Selected Comic Verse, educated J. Roy Birch (1995; 2nd educated 1999)
The Poems of A.E. Housman, educated Archie Burnett (1997)