Death Penalty

In the poem “To an Athlete Dying Young” by A.E. Housman, a classical scholar and poet, who was once a Professor of Latin at University College, in London in 1892, and the song “My Hero” by the band Foo Fighters, an American rock band formed by singer/guitarist/drummer Dave Grohl in 1995, both talk about a hero who dies young and in the peak of their fame. Similar literary elements that the poem and the song shared were they both had apostrophe and both of their stanzas are quatrain. Something that “To an Athlete Dying Young” had that “My Hero” did not have was metaphors and personification. The poem and song are both try to look at death in more of a positive way, and being young but still being able to have such an affect on others. Alfred Edward Housman, usually knowns as A.E. Housman was the eldest of seven siblings, a classical scholar, and poet who lived from 1859 to 1936. In 1877, he won an open scholarship to St. John’s College, Oxford, where he studied classics. In 1892 Housman continued classical studies on his own and published scholarly articles on authors such as Horace, Propertius, Ovid, Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles. Housman was seen as one of the highest classicists of his age, and has been said to be one of the greatest scholars of all time. He got this outstanding reputation by publishing as a private scholar and, on the strength and quality of his work, was made Professor of Latin at University College London and later, at Cambridge. Although Housman's early work and his responsibilities as professor included both Latin and Greek, he began to focusing more on Latin poetry. In 1911, he took the Kennedy Professorship of Latin at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he then stayed for the rest of his life. The Foo Fighters are an American rock band formed in 1995 by singer/guitarist/drummer Dave Grohl. Grohl formed the group as a one-man project after the his previous band Nirvana broke up in 1994. Grohl found Nate Mendel (bass), William