![]() ![]() Many composers have been attracted to Housman’s verse and have set parts of A Shropshire Lad to music. Housman actually failed his Greats and spent many years as a humble clerk in the Patent Office, whilst slowly clawing his way back to academic respectability and eventually to professorships at London University and Cambridge. Butterworth had conspicuous success and went onto a very full and active life as a teacher, musicologist and composer, and finally, a much-decorated soldier. Both were Oxford men, Housman going up to St John’s in 1877, Butterworth going to Trinity in 1904. ’ Butterworth was the more gregarious figure, a stalwart of The English Folk Song and Dance Society who, along with Vaughan Williams, Gustav Holst, Cecil Sharp and Percy Grainger, managed to preserve something of our rich heritage of rural song and dance. ![]() Housman lived on till he was 77, writing little poetry after ‘A Shropshire Lad. George Sainton Kaye Butterworth, was one of the many tragic victims of the First World War, killed by a sniper’s bullet on the Somme on the 15th of August 1916. Butterworth’s music is hardly known in France Housman’s lyrics may be a little more familiar, but I suspect, with rather less merit. I would like to introduce two figures from late nineteenth/early twentieth century English cultural life to French audiences -the composer George Butterworth and the poet A.E.Housman. ![]()
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