A. E. Housman was a British poet, classical scholar, and university teacher, born on 26 March 1859 in Bromsgrove, Worcestershire.

Housman was educated at Bromsgrove School, King Edward's School, and St John's College. Following his formal education, he took employment as a patent examiner in London in 1882, a position he held before returning to academic life. In 1892 he was appointed professor of Latin at University College London, and in 1911 he was appointed Kennedy Professor of Latin at the University of Cambridge, where he remained until his death on 30 April 1936.

Alongside his academic career, Housman worked as a classical philologist and produced scholarly editions of several Latin authors. He edited the works of Manilius, Juvenal, and Lucan, bringing to each the rigorous textual attention characteristic of his philological practice. His work in Latin extended to his functioning as a librettist, and he wrote in both the English and Latin languages throughout his career. His scholarly output and his literary production developed in parallel, and he worked across both registers with evident commitment.

As a poet writing in English, Housman is the author of A Shropshire Lad, a collection that exemplifies his work in the genre of lyric poetry. The lyric form, with its concentration of feeling within compressed, musical verse, remained the defining mode of his literary output. He died in Cambridge in 1936.