A Shropshire Lad is a collection of poems first published in 1896. It initially sold slowly but its emotive themes, focus on dying at a young age and living life to its fullest made it a popular work for young men serving in the Second Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902) and later the First World War (1914–18). While an undergraduate at Oxford, Housman developed romantic feelings for fellow student Moses Jackson (1858–1923), which were not reciprocated. These feelings found their outlet in his poetry but Housman never spoke of them publicly during his lifetime—though he did write about his relationship with Jackson in an essay deposited at the British Museum Library by his brother, Laurence, in 1942 (De Amicitia 'On Friendship'). Several poems in A Shropshire Lad were candid in describing the pain of feeling attraction but being unable to express it openly, see for instance poem XXX of the sequence:

Others, I am not the first
Have willed more mischief than they durst:
If in the breathless night I too
Shiver now, 'tis nothing new.

More than I, if truth were told,
Have stood and sweated hot and cold,
And through their reins in ice and fire
Fear contended with desire.

A Shropshire Lad would come to be an inspiration for the generation of writers that rose to prominence after the First World War, such as WH Auden.

This 1929 edition was printed by the Alcuin Press, a private press founded in 1928 by Herbert Finberg, in a malthouse in Chipping Camden. The press used modern machinery rather than hand printing equipment, but was still concerned with the usual private press virtues of careful layout, printing quality and fine paper.