A. E. Housman

A. E. Housman failed his Oxford final examinations — a catastrophe he never fully explained — and spent a decade as a clerk in the Patent Office, making himself by night into the most formidable classical scholar of his generation. He ended up a professor at Cambridge, feared for his withering footnotes.

A Shropshire Lad (1896), published at his own expense after publishers turned it down, sold slowly at first, then became one of the best-loved books in England: spare, melancholy lyrics of doomed lads and "blue remembered hills" that soldiers carried to the trenches of both the Boer War and the First World War.

"Loveliest of trees, the cherry now" remains the perfect short argument for going outside while you can.