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".