The Fairies Break Their Dances

This is a bas-relief sculpture with a figure on one side and a poem on the opposite side. the poem is The Fairies Break Their Dances by A.E. Housman. This is one of fifteen sculptures that are part of the Greg and Fay Wyatt Sculpture Garden that celebrate dance and poetry.

Alfred Edward Housman ( 26 March 1859 – 30 April 1936) was an English classical scholar and poet. His cycle of poems, A Shropshire Lad, wistfully evokes the constraints and limited choices of youth in the English countryside. The simplicity and distinctive imagery of the writing 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.

Housman was one of the foremost classicists of his age and has been ranked as one of the greatest scholars at thattime.He established his reputation publishing as a private scholar at first and, on the strength and quality of his work, was appointed Professor of Latin at University College London and then at the University of Cambridge. His editions of Juvenal, Manilius and Lucan are still considered authoritative.