Alfred Edward Housman, usually known as A. E. Housman, was an English classical scholar and poet, best known to the general public for his cycle of poems A Shropshire Lad. Lyrical and almost epigrammatic in form, the poems wistfully evoke the dooms and disappointments of youth in the English countryside. Their beauty, simplicity and distinctive imagery appealed strongly to Edwardian taste, and to many early 20th-century English composers both before and after the First World War. Through their song-settings, the poems became closely associated with that era, and with Shropshire itself.
Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann was a German Romantic author of fantasy and Gothic horror, a jurist, composer, music critic and artist. His stories form the basis of Jacques Offenbach's famous opera The Tales of Hoffmann, in which Hoffmann appears as the hero. He is also the author of the novella The Nutcracker and the Mouse King, on which Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's ballet The Nutcracker is based. The ballet Coppélia is based on two other stories that Hoffmann wrote, while Schumann's Kreisleriana is based on Hoffmann's character Johannes Kreisler.
Bacchylides was a Greek lyric poet. Later Greeks included him in the canonical list of nine lyric poets which included his uncle Simonides. The elegance and polished style of his lyrics have been noted in Bacchylidean scholarship since at least Longinus. Some scholars, however, have characterized these qualities as superficial charm. He has often been compared unfavourably with his contemporary, Pindar, as "a kind of Boccherini to Pindar's Haydn". However, the differences in their styles do not allow for easy comparison, and translator Robert Fagles has written that "to blame Bacchylides for not being Pindar is as childish a judgement as to condemn ... Marvel for missing the grandeur of Milton". His career coincided with the ascendency of dramatic styles of poetry, as embodied in the works of Aeschylus or Sophocles, and he is in fact considered one of the last poets of major significance within the more ancient tradition of purely lyric poetry. The most notable features of his lyrics are their clarity in expression and simplicity of thought, making them an ideal introduction to the study of Greek lyric poetry in general and to Pindar's verse in particular.
Dodona in Epirus in northwestern Greece was the oldest Hellenic oracle, possibly dating to the second millennium BCE according to Herodotus. The earliest accounts in Homer describe Dodona as an oracle of Zeus. Situated in a remote region away from the main Greek poleis, it was considered second only to the oracle of Delphi in prestige.
Richard Bentley was an English classical scholar, critic, and theologian. He was Master of Trinity College, Cambridge.
Laurence Housman was an English playwright, writer and illustrator.
Sir Richard Claverhouse Jebb was a British classical scholar.
A Shropshire Lad is a collection of sixty-three poems by the English poet Alfred Edward Housman, published in 1896. After a slow beginning, it rapidly grew in popularity, particularly among young readers. Composers began setting the poems to music less than ten years after their first appearance. Many parodies have also been written that satirise Housman's themes and stylistic characteristics.
Elias Murr is a Lebanese politician who held different cabinet positions.
Keith Omar Murray is an American rapper from Long Island, New York and a member of the hip hop trio Def Squad, which includes fellow rappers Redman and Erick Sermon.
Kreisleriana, Op. 16, is a composition in eight movements by Robert Schumann for solo piano, subtitled Phantasien für das Pianoforte. It was written in only four days in April 1838 and a revised version appeared in 1850. The work was dedicated to Frédéric Chopin, but when a copy was sent to the Polish composer, "he commented favorably only on the design of the title page".
Last Poems (1922) was the last of the two volumes of poems which A. E. Housman published during his lifetime. Of the 42 poems there, seventeen were given titles, a greater proportion than in his previous collection, A Shropshire Lad (1896). Although it was not quite so popular with composers, the majority of the poems there have been set to music.
The Invention of Love is a 1997 play by Tom Stoppard portraying the life of poet A. E. Housman, focusing specifically on his personal life and love for a college classmate. The play is written from the viewpoint of Housman, dealing with his memories at the end of his life, and contains many classical allusions. The Invention of Love won both the Evening Standard Award (U.K.) and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award (U.S.)
Robert Minhinnick is a Welsh poet, essayist, novelist and translator. He has won two Forward Prizes for Best Individual Poem and has received the Wales Book of the Year award a record three times.
Rap-Murr-Phobia is the fifth studio album by rapper Keith Murray. It was released on July 31, 2007 through Koch Records and was almost entirely produced by Erick Sermon. The album was released four years after his previous album, He's Keith Murray, Commercially, the album was a mild success, peaking at 52 on the Billboard 200 and 7 on the Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums
The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr together with a fragmentary Biography of Kapellmeister Johannes Kreisler on Random Sheets of Waste Paper is a complex satirical novel by Prussian Romantic-era author E.T.A. Hoffmann. It was first published in 1819-1821 as Lebens-Ansichten des Katers Murr nebst fragmentarischer Biographie des Kapellmeisters Johannes Kreisler in zufälligen Makulaturblättern, in two volumes. A planned third volume was never completed. It was Hoffmann's final novel and is considered his masterpiece. It reflected his concepts of aesthetics, and predated post-modern literary techniques in its unusual structure. Critic Alex Ross writes of the novel, "If the phantasmagoric 'Kater Murr' were published tomorrow as the work of a young Brooklyn hipster, it might be hailed as a tour de force of postmodern fiction."
E. A. Pierce & Co. was a securities brokerage firm based in New York City. Founded as A.A. Housman & Co., the firm was renamed for Edward A. Pierce in 1927. In 1930, following the stock market crash of 1929 E. A. Pierce acquired the brokerage business of Merrill Lynch. Ten years later, Merrill Lynch merged with E. A. Pierce.
On Wenlock Edge is a song cycle composed in 1909 by Ralph Vaughan Williams for tenor, piano and string quartet. The cycle comprises settings of six poems from A. E. Housman's 1896 collection A Shropshire Lad. A typical performance lasts around 22 minutes. It was premiered by Gervase Elwes, Frederick Kiddle and the Schwiller Quartet on 15 November 1909 in the Aeolian Hall, London. It was later orchestrated by the composer in a version first performed on 24 January, 1924.
The Astronomica, also known as the Astronomicon, is a Latin didactic poem about celestial phenomena, written in hexameters and divided into five books. The Astronomica was penned c. AD 10–20 by a Roman poet whose name was likely Marcus Manilius; little is known of Manilius, and although there is evidence that the Astronomica was probably read by many other Roman writers, no surviving works explicitly quote him.
John Jebb was an Irish Anglican priest in the second half of the 18th century.
