The Victorian age was full of sages – men and women who could write earth-shattering treatises, tromp through the wilderness for days, solve major social problems, edit newspapers, and pen a few sonnets in their spare time. They worked in bottle factories and as patent clerks before going on to rock the world. In other words, it was an age of heroes.

Even though A.E. Housman's long, long career spanned both the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, we're going to think of him as one of the sages. After all, he was a don at Cambridge, which has a reputation for hiring smarties. Interestingly enough, his professorship (which he held from 1911 until his death) was actually in Latin.

Luckily, though, "When I was One-and-Twenty" is written in English. You could even say that it's super-English – after all, it comes from a collection of 63 poems called A Shropshire Lad. But, if you think that Housman was a country boy frolicking in the fields of Shropshire, you couldn't be further off the mark. Houseman wrote them while he was in London. It turns out that he hadn't even been to Shropshire.

…so sure, the guy's a tiny bit of a poser. But as it turns out, his poems were wildly popular in the early twentieth century. And when you think that this guy was being read right around the time that T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound were breaking out their versions of Modernism, it becomes pretty incredible that such different styles could have captured the hearts (or eyes) of the reading public!

For every poem about how much love rocks, there's got to be at least one poem out there about how much love sucks.

Before you get your hopes up, this is one of the latter. But hey – maybe you're in the mood to pop all those heart-shaped balloons around you and stomp on some boxes of chocolate. After all, if all those online dating sites are making money, chances are that not everyone finds love to be moonbeams and sunshine and candied hearts.

And let's face it – it's totally fun to watch other people's hearts get crushed. We don't say that in a mean way. But sometimes it's nice to see that you're in good company. Admit it: do you watch The Bachelor because two people will find true love? Or do you watch it because 21 other pretty, competent women get dumped on national television?

OK, you don't have to answer one. We're just saying that it's OK to learn from (or even take pleasure in) the sorrows of others. Hey, the Germans even have a word for it: shadenfreude. That's the technical term for taking pleasure in the suffering of others.

Maybe you're not as mean-spirited as we are. But we think that it's all in good fun!