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Housman Country

Into the Heart of England

Peter Parker

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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ISBN10: 0374537860
ISBN13: 9780374537869

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546 Pages

$24.00

CA$24.50

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A. E. Housman’s A Shropshire Lad made little impression when it was first published in 1896 but has since become one of the best-loved volumes of poetry in the English language. Its evocation of the English countryside, thwarted love, and a yearning for things lost is as potent today as it was more than a century ago, and the book has never been out of print.

In Housman Country, Peter Parker explores the lives of A. E. Housman and his most famous book, and in doing so shows how A Shropshire Lad has permeated English life and culture since its publication. The poems were taken to war by soldiers who wanted to carry England in their pockets, were adapted by composers trying to create a new kind of English music, and have influenced poetry, fiction, music, and drama right up to the present day. Everyone has a personal “land of lost content” with “blue remembered hills,” and Housman has been a tangible and far-reaching presence in a startling range of work, from the war poets and Ralph Vaughan Williams to Inspector Morse and Morrissey.

Housman Country is a vivid exploration of England and Englishness, in which Parker maps out terrain that is as historical and emotional as it is topographical.

Reviews

Praise for Housman Country

"[A] fine exploration . . . Housman once described his poems as a kind of 'morbid secretion,' so what is their special appear to his countrymen? Parker offers an answer: 'At heart, Housman was a romantic—though a romantic of a peculiarly doom-laden and tight-lipped English variety: Because one is lapidary, it does not mean one has a heart of stone.' Indeed."—Alan Riding, The New York Times Book Review

"Peter Parker’s beautifully written Housman Country is about how A Shropshire Lad (1896) similarly affected young people, especially young men, during the first part of the 20th century. While partly biographical, it’s mainly a cultural history of a certain sort of romantic, nostalgic Englishness . . . highly recommended."—Michael Dirda, The Washington Post

"[Parker] offers a sensitive, well-researched study of the poet and his time . . . Mr. Parker is an unabashed enthusiast who makes a spirited case for the artistic merit of the work . . . Mr. Parker’s labor of love is enriched by a remarkable breadth of research and is guided by keen intelligence, and only a foolhardy writer would have the hubris to undertake another book of its kind."—Jamie James, The Wall Street Journal

"Parker ably charts the weird but potent energies of Housman's poetic economy . . . Many of the responses, tributes, and recollection unearthed by Parker are both striking and moving . . . For numerous readers, Parker demonstrates in rich and varied detail, Housman's poetry both articulated and incarnated 'the land of lost content.'"—Mark Ford, The New York Review of Books

"Nobody could do it better. [Parker] has sympathetically explored the nature of Housman himself, and the intellectual climate of his day, and the particular sense of mingled pride, resentment and tragedy that was to haunt the England of his time . . . Parker explores far more profoundly than I can the personal, historical and intellectual impulses that created A Shropshire Lad."—Jan Morris, American Scholar

"Housman Country offers three books for the price of one: a lucid biographical portrait; a study of Housman's lasting influence on our culture; and, as an appendix, the whole of A Shropshire Lad. The poet who emerges is complex: cheery, grumpy, generous, begrudging, gentle and robust . . . As Parker shows in his fine study, the borders of Housman land are uncontrolled and stretch as far as Russia and China.”—Blake Morrison, The Guardian (UK)

"In offering this rich blend of literary criticism and cultural history, Parker proves to be the perfect guide to what he calls 'Housman Country', measured and discreetly witty . . . his fine book reminds us why so many readers still have passages of A Shropshire Lad by heart."—Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, The Spectator (UK)

"Writing with elegance and an informed knowledge of the subject both deep and broad, Parker contributes a cultural history that itself is as distinguished a work of literature as its focus, a book often considered the first great classic of modern literature in English."Booklist (starred review)

"This work embodies Englishness, with its focus on the rural and its elegiac tone . . . An enjoyable and informative account of a much-loved collection."Library Journal

Reviews from Goodreads

BOOK EXCERPTS

Read an Excerpt

I

ENGLAND IN YOUR POCKET


He is a strange phenomenon, but to my mind the most perfect expression of something deeply English and a whole mood of English history – a true master.

Ted Hughes on A.E. Housman

Towards...

About the author

Peter Parker

Peter Parker was born in Herefordshire and was educated in the Malverns, Dorset, and London. He is the author ofThe Old Lie: The Great War and the Public-School Ethos and biographies of J. R. Ackerley and Christopher Isherwood. He edited The Reader’s Companion to the Twentieth-Century Novel and The Reader’s Companion to Twentieth-Century Writers, and was an associate editor of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. He writes about books and gardening for a wide variety of newspapers and magazines and lives in London’s East End.

Lucinda Douglas-Menzies

Peter Parker

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