A Shropshire Lad cover art

A Shropshire Lad

 Preview
Get this deal Try Premium Plus free
Offer ends December 16, 2025 11:59pm GMT.
Prime members: New to Audible? Get 2 free audiobooks during trial.
Just £0.99/mo for your first 3 months of Audible.
1 bestseller or new release per month—yours to keep.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, podcasts, and Originals.
Auto-renews at £8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, celeb exclusives, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically.

A Shropshire Lad

By: A. E. Housman
Narrated by: Samuel West
Get this deal Try Premium Plus free

£8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly. Offer ends December 16, 2025 11:59pm GMT.

£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Buy Now for £7.99

Buy Now for £7.99

Only £0.99 a month for the first 3 months. Pay £0.99 for the first 3 months, and £8.99/month thereafter. Renews automatically. Terms apply. Start my membership

About this listen

Naxos AudioBooks continues its popular The Great Poets series with A Shropshire Lad by A. E. Housman. Published at the author’s own expense in 1896, after rejection from publishers, the collection contains a cycle of 63 poems. Despite exploring themes of lost love, obsession, pessimism, and death, the poems touched English readers and the book became a best seller during the Second Boer War and World War I. The collection, set in a half-imagined pastoral Shropshire, includes the well-known poems "When I Was One-and-Twenty", "To an Athlete Dying Young", and "Loveliest of Trees, the Cherry Now".

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying reference material will be available in your My Library section along with the audio.

Public Domain (P)2011 Naxos AudioBooks Ancient, Classical & Medieval Literature Poetry England

Listeners also enjoyed...

 The Poems of T. S. Eliot cover art
Winter Words cover art
The Sunday Sessions cover art
The Prelude cover art
The Life and Works of William Butler Yeats cover art
The Great Poets cover art
The Other Wise Man cover art
Poems by William Wordsworth cover art
Robert Browning: Selected Poems cover art
Of Love and Desire cover art
The Great Poets: Alfred Lord Tennyson cover art
Phantastes cover art
The Great Poets: Percy Bysshe Shelley cover art
Songs of a Sourdough cover art
Great Poets of the Romantic Age cover art
Goblin Market cover art

Editor reviews

Housman is a high-water mark of British lyric poetry, and this fine production captures perfectly his strong, melodic beat and decisive rhyme, and his wonderful way with words. Samuel West’s cultivated Midlands accent may not be specifically Shropshire, but his voice and reading are true to Housman-who was not, after all, some rough Shropshire lad himself but an Oxford don. His “Loveliest of Trees, the Cherry Now” and “To an Athlete Dying Young” are beautifully rendered here. West, you feel, reads poetry as it should be read-confidently, with ease and conviction, as if all the world spoke in meter and rhyme.
All stars
Most relevant
I’m gutted this will be taken off Audible shortly, I genuinely love this collection of poems, as a younger listener, I’m drawn into A E Housman and his romantic vision of Shropshire (made all the more poignant when you know he never visited the place), and the touching way the narrator brings these poems to melancholy life.
It’s just that there’s not much of Housman on Audible, and what else is here isn’t as well narrated as this.
This is a really lovely collection to listen to, and I’ll be sad to see the back of it :(

Gutted this will be taken off

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
I enjoy the poetry of A E Housman who is to Shropshire what Thomas Hardy is to Wessex. Here are 63 poems that Housman self-published in 1896 when in his late thirties. There is melancholy that is poignant but also some jolly poems. It's a pleasant way to spend an hour. Included is one of the nation's favourites: Loveliest of Trees, but there is so much more

Enjoyable way to pass an hour

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
I didn’t like the preoccupation with death, but it’s interesting that later on the anthology was a solace to the soldiers in the first world war.

Brilliantly read

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.