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Alfred Edward Housman was the greatest English classical scholar of his time and a poet of great ability and mastery within the limitations of his chosen themes and form. A Shropshire Lad, published in 1896 at the author's expense, became one of the most popular and best-selling books of verse in the English language, rivaling Edward FitzGerald's Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, with which it shares a conception of the briefness of youth and life, a disbelief in human immortality or the existence of God, and a carpe diem philosophy emphasizing the necessity of capitalizing on life's opportunities while one may.
A. E. Housman was the first of the seven children of Sarah Jane and Edward Housman, a solicitor. He was born in Fockbury, Worcestershire, on 26 March 1859; the following year, the family moved to Bromsgrove, near Birmingham. From Perry Hall, the Housman family home in Bromsgrove, in the valley of the Severn River, the boy Housman could see in the distance the hills of Shropshire, a place that he would later, in his poems, imbue with mythical significance, although his firsthand experience with the actual Shropshire remained slight.
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