The following version of this poem was used to create this guide: Housman, Alfred E. “To an Athlete Dying Young” Poetry Foundation. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46452/to-an-athlete-dying-young.

Note that all parenthetical citations within the guide refer to the lines of the poem from which the quotations are taken.

Alfred E. Housman was an English poet and classical scholar born in 1859 in Bromsgrove, Worcestershire. While he demonstrated early academic and poetic promise, later even winning a scholarship to St. John’s College in Oxford, his over dedication to the classics caused him to neglect the history and philosophy that was also part of his curriculum. Following his time at Oxford, Housman, with the help of his close friend and roommate Moses John Jackson, obtained work as a clerk in a London patent office. However, Housman and Jackson later became estranged when Houseman confessed to Jackson the unrequited same-sex love he had for him. While working as a clerk, Housman continued to pursue the classics independently and was able to publish several scholarly articles on his own, eventually specializing in Latin. In 1911, he became a professor at Trinity College, Cambridge.

As a poet, Housman is best known for his 1896 cycle, A Shropshire Lad, of which “To an Athlete Dying Young” is poem XIX. Although all the poems in the cycle are connected by the provincial, titular setting of “Shropshire,” Housman wrote the poems in the collection before he had ever visited Shropshire himself and was still living in London. For the most part, Housman’s experiences with Shropshire were limited to seeing its hills on the western horizon while growing up in Worcestershire. As such, while the major themes of A Shropshire Lad and “To an Athlete Dying Young” focus on the nostalgia of returning home to the familiar rural setting of one’s childhood, the poems in Housman’s collection also combine this nostalgia with a sense of idealized fantasy, in which the pastoral Shropshire that is yearned for throughout the cycle is half-imaginary.

Initially, A Shropshire Lad sold poorly, only bursting in popularity during the Second Boer War and World War I – one of its major themes was dying young and often far away from home in the midst of military conflict. In fact, during World War I, many soldiers carried A Shropshire Lad with them into the trenches.