A E Housman was a gifted and distinguished scholar who brought his highly trained and subtle skills as a textual critic to bear on a number of classical poets; from 1911 until his death he was Professor of Latin at Cambridge University.

In 1896, Housman produced and paid for the publication of A Shropshire Lad, a collection of sixty-three compressed and concentrated poems. Refined and lyrical, they centred on unrequited love, a nostalgic evocation of the countryside, patriotic pride and the idealisation of military life. The collection gained critical and popular acclaim over the next two decades, particularly during the First World War.

For the quarter of a century that followed the publication of A Shropshire Lad, Housman's poetic output was reduced to a mere trickle and he chose instead to focus on writing scholarly publications, turning his attention in particular towards the obscure classical Roman author Manilius, completing a total of five volumes on this little considered writer.

In 1922 Housman produced his second collection of verse, decisively entitled Last Poems. The poems contained in this volume showed no real development in style and were almost identical in theme and form to those of their predecessor. Although rebuked by critics for this apparent deficit, Housman's work transgressed many barriers of age and taste. Acknowledgement as the forerunner of the Georgian poets' rural verse, his work is seen as an important precursor to the development of modern poetry.

After his death, the poet's brother, dramatist Laurence Housman, gathered together More Poems (1936). This was followed by Collected Poems (1939) and Collected Poems and Selected Prose (1988).