Housman Country: Into the Heart of England

4.2/5 ( ratings)

A captivating exploration of A. E. Housman and the influence of his particular brand of Englishness

“He is a strange phenomenon,” Ted Hughes wrote of A. E. Housman, “but to my mind the most perfect expression of a whole mood of English history—a true master.” Housman—classical scholar and poet—is best known for the collection A Shropshire Lad. When the book was published in 1896, it made little impact, but it has since become one of the best-loved volumes of poetry in the English language. An evocation of English character and countryside, A Shropshire Lad remains as potent today as it was more than a century ago.

Housman Country is an account of the life and times of A Shropshire Lad. In this absorbing volume, Peter Parker investigates the particular English sensibility that imbues Housman’s verse. A believer in the power of poetry to both provide pleasure and harmonize grief, Housman was a romantic—though a romantic of a doom-laden English variety. Deftly intertwining literary analysis, biography, and cultural history, Parker shows that these poems were not only far-reaching—carried into battle by World War I soldiers and set to music by twentieth-century composers—but also deeply communal, shaping notions of English national identity.

Mapping out a terrain that is as literary as it is historical, Parker animates the fascinating personality of a man who produced one of England’s most influential works of literature.