It is a technique employed often in the concluding lines of hymn texts, and has been employed in poetry to change tone or announce a conclusion, including its use in Joyce Kilmer's "Trees" and A.E. Housman's "To an Athlete Dying Young." Robert Wallace argues in his Meter in English that the term acephalous line seems "pejorative", as if criticising the poet's violation of scansion, but this view is not widely held among critics.
He achieved success in his own day as a composer of choral works such as The Forsaken Merman (1895), Intimations of Immortality (which he conducted at Leeds Festival in 1907), and The Passion of Christ (1914) but is now chiefly remembered for his song cycles such as Maud (after Tennyson, 1898) and the first known setting (1904) of A. E. Housman's A Shropshire Lad.
In 2007, Letters of A. E. Housman, was edited by Archie Burnett, one of the co-directors of the Institute, and an edition in eleven volumes of the writings of the Victorian lawyer and controversialist James Fitzjames Stephen is being edited by Christopher Ricks and Frances Whistler.
His effort was not well received by fellow Classicists, most notably the poet and scholar A. E. Housman, who offered a particularly scathing review.
The poem, which ended with a - presumably satirical - reminder to "scorn the counsel" of "the guardian friend", proved both prophetic and influential; the former in anticipating Sir John's career, and the latter in influencing A.E. Housman's A Shropshire Lad.
Most importantly, like McGonagall, she was drawn to themes of accident, disaster, and sudden death; as has been said of A. E. Housman's A Shropshire Lad, in her pages you can count the dead and wounded.
The epigrams at the beginning of chapters are taken from, for instance, John Bunyan, Walt Whitman, T.S. Eliot, Edgar Allan Poe, Christian Morgenstern, Lewis Carroll, A.E. Housman, Oscar Wilde, and the Finnish poet Uuno Kailas, which is a hint at what Ristikivi was reading at the time.
Last Poems (1922) is the second and last of the two volumes of poems A. E. Housman published during his lifetime - the first, and better-known, being A Shropshire Lad (1896).
Peros’ second CD, Songs, was released November 2000, and features 31 songs for solo voice & piano with texts by Emily Dickinson, A.E. Housman, William Wordsworth, Robert Louis Stevenson, William Blake and, most notably, Emily Brontë – 17 of the 31 songs on the CD are settings of Brontë's poetry, with some songs being the first time that Brontë's poems have been set to music.
In January 1934, Pound published a critique of A. E. Housman's The Name and Nature of Poetry in the Criterion.
For the songs he set poems to music and sang them, verses by A. E. Housman, W. E. Henley, Walter de la Mare and other well-known poets, and particularly the Australian-born poet Vicki Raymond.
A. E. Housman referred to the town as "Uricon" in his poem "On Wenlock Edge" in A Shropshire Lad.