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Housman Country: Into the Heart of England Paperback – June 19, 2018
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A New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice and Nominated for the 2017 PEN/Bograd Weld Prize for Biography
A captivating exploration of A. E. Housman and the influence of his particular brand of Englishness
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.
- Print length546 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherFarrar, Straus and Giroux
- Publication dateJune 19, 2018
- Dimensions6 x 1.22 x 9 inches
- ISBN-100374537860
- ISBN-13978-0374537869
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Editorial Reviews
Review
The Financial Times, the Spectator, the Evening Standard and the Sunday Times Best Books of 2016
"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, New York Review of Books
"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, Washington Post
"[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, New York Times Book Review
"[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, Wall Street Journal
"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
"An excellent, wholly attractive presentation of [Housman's] life and work by Peter Parker...who writes about his subject in such a way that suggests he is a good candidate for Housman’s ideal reader. In its combination of biographical and literary criticism, historical acuity, and finely tuned response to the “landscape” of Housman’s achievement, Parker provides an introduction to the poet that goes deep “into the heart of England,”as his subtitle has it." ―William H. Pritchard, Commonweal
"Parker is a master of portraying Housman's various moods throughout his life . . . Parker's Housman Country is a huge book of careful scholarship lightly worn." ―Michael Langan, NBC-2
"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)
"A jolly good nostalgic walk through Housman country . . . [A] capacious, generous work of literary and cultural history...Delightful, enchanting, and learned." ―Kirkus
"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
"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
"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
"Peter Parker's new book is much more than a biography, and having lured us into Housman's life with a magpie's eye for detail, he then sets out on a tour of Housman Country―not a geographical area but a landscape of the mind in which 'literature, landscape,music and emotion' all contribute.” ―Maggie Ferguson, The Economist
“This excellent and extraordinarily thorough biography … reminds us why [Housman] was so celebrated and how pervasive his influence on British culture has been.” ―Mark Cocker, Sunday Telegraph
“[A] glorious fantasia on a theme of Housman … Peter Parker’s book is replete with fabulous observations.” ―Roger Lewis, The Times
“Peter Parker’s study of the poems as a cultural phenomenon is an elegant guide to the “land of lost content” ― an England of the imagination whose grip on the national psyche has proved curiously tenacious.” ―Jane Shilling, Evening Standard (Books of the Year)
About the Author
Product details
- Publisher : Farrar, Straus and Giroux; Reprint edition (June 19, 2018)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 546 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0374537860
- ISBN-13 : 978-0374537869
- Item Weight : 1.75 pounds
- Dimensions : 6 x 1.22 x 9 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #4,871,988 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #5,081 in British & Irish Poetry
- #5,328 in Poetry Literary Criticism (Books)
- #7,412 in British & Irish Literary Criticism (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Peter Parker is the author of biographies of J.R. Ackerley and Christopher Isherwood, The Old Lie, The Last Veteran, Housman Country and A Little Book of Latin for Gardeners. He has edited A Reader's Guide to the Twentieth-Century Novel, Reader's Guide to Twentieth-Century Writers, and a two-volume anthology, Some Men In London: Queer Life 1945-1959 and 1960-1967. He is an advisory editor of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. He wrote introduction to G.F. Green's In the Making and contributed essays to Britten’s Century and Fifty Gay and Lesbian Books Everybody Must Read. He has written about people, books, art, architecture and gardening for a wide variety of newspapers and magazines.
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It is not about war, and yet to speaks to the experience of war. It is not about the Industrial Revolution, and yet it looks backward to a time and a place idealized because of what the Industrial Revolution wrought. Critics generally didn’t like it (and haven’t liked it since), but the reading public loved it.
Author Peter Parker explains why, in the recently published “Housman Country: Into the Heart of England.” More than another other book of poetry, more than any other novel, “A Shropshire Lad” is about England, what it meant, what’s been lost, and what’s endured. It is nostalgic, but it is nostalgia with a bite, what Parker calls “true nostalgia,” the past you can recognize but never regain.
“It is when the Lad is furthest away from his country,” he writes, “looking back at it from exile in London, that he finds it most appealing, and this reflects the nostalgia of not only of Housman himself, obliged to abandon the rural scenes of his youth in order to earn a living in the capital, but of a large swathe of the English population.” That nostalgia is not only English but American and Canadian as well. But it is inherently English, and the collection framed the broad understanding of what England was and what it still is.
Parker also undertakes an extensive investigation of how “A Shropshire Lad” came to be. Housman wasn’t a Shropshire lad himself; he was actually born and raised next door in Worcestershire. During his school days, he had a distant view of the Shropshire hills from his window, but he never spent much time there.
The collection was born of Housman’s own experiences, stories he heard while growing up, and even, Parker says, a very long infatuation with a fellow Oxford student and close friend, Moses Jackson, who did not return Housman’s interest. The strains of that infatuation play through “A Shropshire Lad,” and it may be that sense of rejection and being an “outsider” that also appealed to so many readers.
The work was not written as a collection of war poetry, but it undoubtedly influenced the famous poets of World War I, including Wilfred Own, Siegfried Sassoon, and Rupert Brooke. But it became strongly associated with was. “It was the war itself,” Parker says,” that made Housman a war poet, and one of the reasons why is that World War I was the first war fought not be professional soldiers but by volunteers and conscripts, just like those lads from Shropshire.
Parker is the author of “Ackerley: The Life of J.R. Ackerley” (1991); “Isherwood: A Life Revealed” (2004); “The Old Lie: The Great War and the Public School Ethos” (2007); and “The Last Veteran: Harry Patch and the Legacy of War” (2009). He writes about novelists, poets, World War I, and gardening for a wide array of publications, including The Spectator. He lives in London’s East End.
“Housman Country” is a significant achievement in scholarship. In addition to the narrative, the book includes an extensive bibliography, notes, and table of contents, as well as the entire text of “A Shropshire Lad” as an appendix. It’s a moving work, reminding us of how our understanding of a poem or a poetry collection, comes to be, and what makes certain poems resonate so deeply within our minds.
R.L. Stivelman, M.D.
Top reviews from other countries
Criticisms: How can you possibly publish a large size book like this in 2016 and not have photographs? Everyone expects them, they add enormously to your subject, and in this case, they are abundantly available, not just, as with some subjects, a bunch of stock shots that everyone has seen. It would have been comparatively easy to get say 10 pages of very good black and white photographs to print in a section on glossy paper as is the normal case. I regard that as a serious, though not "disqualifying" omission.