Alfred Edward Housman (pronounced /'ha?sm?n/; 26 March 1859 – 30 April 1936), usually known as A. E. Housman, was an English classical scholar and poet best known for his cycle of poems A Shropshire Lad. Lyrical and almost epigrammatic in form, the poems were mostly written before 1900.The poems are pervaded by deep pessimism and preoccupation with death, without religious consolation. Their wistful evocation of doomed youth in the English countryside, in spare language and distinctive imagery, appealed strongly to late Victorian and Edwardian taste, and to many early twentieth century English composers (beginning with Arthur Somervell) both before and after the First World War. Through its song-setting the poetry became closely associated with that era, and with Shropshire itself.

Between 1909 and 1911 George Butterworth produced settings in two collections or cycles, as Six Songs from A Shropshire Lad, and Bredon Hill and other songs. He also wrote an orchestral tone poem on A Shropshire Lad (first performed at Leeds Festival under Arthur Nikisch in 1912).[21]

Butterworth's death on the Somme in 1916 was considered a great loss to English music; Ivor Gurney, another most important setter of Housman (Ludlow and Teme, a work for voice and string quartet, and a song-cycle on Housman works, both of which won the Carnegie Award[22]) experienced emotional breakdowns which were popularly (but wrongly) believed to have arisen from shell-shock. Hence the fatalistic strain of the poems, and the earlier settings, foreshadowed responses to the universal bereavement of the First World War and became assimilated into them.