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Housman Country: Into the Heart of England
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 coun - tryside, 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 influ - enced 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.
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 coun - tryside, 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 influ - enced 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.
544 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2016
About the author
Peter Parker
10 books5 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
Peter Parker (1954-) was born in Herefordshire and educated in the Malverns, Dorset and London. He is the author of The Old Lie: The Great War and 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.
Peter Parker (1954-) was born in Herefordshire and educated in the Malverns, Dorset and London. He is the author of The Old Lie: The Great War and 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.
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Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
November 13, 2017
This is a book for the “for ever England” crowd, for lovers of villages, troubled woods and blue remembered hills – also for lovers of bleak poetry, lovers of doomed youth, lovers of every beauty that cannot last. Echoes of Housman’s poetry haunt my adolescence, but it wasn’t until I discovered a tiny Faber & Faber collection in a Vancouver bookstore in 2001 with an introduction by Alan Hollingsworth that I read his poems in depth, which in turn set me up for Tom Stoppard’s The Invention of Love – and then the echoes were everywhere: Morrissey, “Inspector Morse,” a performance of Vaughan Williams’s “Bredon Hill” at SoundBox. I don’t know how many books borrow the title An Air That Kills from Housman; I have two – one from Andrew Taylor’s mournful Lydmouth crime series; the second from Valancourt Press’s reissue of Francis King’s pre-Stonewall classic. There are multiple performances of Housman on YouTube, including a set filed under PTMGMC (poetry that makes grown men cry). There are guide books and watercolors and walking tours. And this, as Peter Parker proves, is just a chip off the tip of the Housman iceberg.
It took me a couple months to read this book because it rewards distraction. First there’s the story of Housman himself, who had the bad luck to fall in love with a friend who couldn’t love him back, then the brilliance to turn the misery into poetry. It’s the back story of every Edwardian homosexual, but Housman’s sublime repression caught the country’s imagination and has never released its grip. Parker’s book includes the whole of A Shropshire Lad as an elegant appendix, which is handy as the poems appear again and again in endless metamorphoses. I lost a week or two in the chapter on English Music. I was familiar with a couple Vaughn Williams settings but the cycles by George Butterworth, Ivor Gurney, and Julius Harrison were new to me, and led me down the audio archives of iTunes and YouTube. Another week wandering in the chapter on English Soldiers. A Shropshire Lad was in the pockets of thousands of young men plucked from their farms and towns and sent to their slaughter. Housman was so much an influence on the young poets of World War I that he seemed one of them.
Parker documents all of this, an embarrassment of reference, too thick for quick reading but ideal for rambling across the web, tracing the geography and the sentiment, the mythos of England. At times Housman’s perfectly-scanned melancholy is almost comic – and yet I've come to enjoy these poems even more than before, despite myself.
It took me a couple months to read this book because it rewards distraction. First there’s the story of Housman himself, who had the bad luck to fall in love with a friend who couldn’t love him back, then the brilliance to turn the misery into poetry. It’s the back story of every Edwardian homosexual, but Housman’s sublime repression caught the country’s imagination and has never released its grip. Parker’s book includes the whole of A Shropshire Lad as an elegant appendix, which is handy as the poems appear again and again in endless metamorphoses. I lost a week or two in the chapter on English Music. I was familiar with a couple Vaughn Williams settings but the cycles by George Butterworth, Ivor Gurney, and Julius Harrison were new to me, and led me down the audio archives of iTunes and YouTube. Another week wandering in the chapter on English Soldiers. A Shropshire Lad was in the pockets of thousands of young men plucked from their farms and towns and sent to their slaughter. Housman was so much an influence on the young poets of World War I that he seemed one of them.
It’s easy to see why these poems were carried to the front. They were, after all, young men’s poems, and the feelings they describe were intensified in wartime: close masculine friendships; a sense that life is unjust and that fate is against one; the notion that life is passing all too quickly and that death is always standing by, ready to harvest the young.And then there’s that eros pulsing just beneath the surface. For all its Roman reticence, Housman’s poetry proclaims its secret love, its almost necrophiliac obsession with athletes dying young, the lads that will die in their glory and never be old, the “almost fatalistic sense that boys in particular are teetering upon the edges of both perfection and doom.” There’s a bit too much of the orating headmaster in The History Boys for my taste, this Latinate preoccupation with the lads, a word that waves its banner for those who have eyes to see what they will never possess. Of course. Eros itself means loss.
Parker documents all of this, an embarrassment of reference, too thick for quick reading but ideal for rambling across the web, tracing the geography and the sentiment, the mythos of England. At times Housman’s perfectly-scanned melancholy is almost comic – and yet I've come to enjoy these poems even more than before, despite myself.
June 7, 2018
An unbeatable review of Housman’s life and works.
This has taken some time to read mainly because the subject warrants careful study but also because I found myself wanting to reflect on what I read and to go back and re-read parts. It is an essential book if you want to understand Housman’s life and work and the quality of his verse. The book also puts it into both the literary and social contexts that a Shropshire Lad particularly relates to and reflects. It’s well written and must be considered an indispensable contribution to English literature in general and to understanding the poetry of the time. The author wears his learning well.
This has taken some time to read mainly because the subject warrants careful study but also because I found myself wanting to reflect on what I read and to go back and re-read parts. It is an essential book if you want to understand Housman’s life and work and the quality of his verse. The book also puts it into both the literary and social contexts that a Shropshire Lad particularly relates to and reflects. It’s well written and must be considered an indispensable contribution to English literature in general and to understanding the poetry of the time. The author wears his learning well.
August 18, 2018
The wonderful mashup of literary biography and cultural history lends itself particularly well to the curious case of Alfred Edward Housman, the appeal of whose apparently simple poetry is located so inextricably within the complex matrix of the social history of his time and our perception of it. The late Victorians and Edwardians (when they weren't waving the flag of Empire) were infused with nostalgia and a sense of loss, and we in turn have become nostalgic for their nostalgia. I can’t help feeling that this approach would work with other artists too: after all, every artist (every human being) is a country, and it is often the geography of the country that is as interesting as the person at its centre…
September 2, 2016
Abandoned at my usual place of abandon (50 pages) - just too dry and heavy going.
January 31, 2020
The first piece of information that strikes the reader on opening Housman Country is the odd circumstance that A.E. Housman hardly ever visited Shropshire. The most famous poem sequence that bears the county's name was composed from memories of Housman's native Worcestershire with the far distant (blue remembered) hills of Shropshire in the distance. This has led to some topographical errors, most particularly the description of one particular Shropshire church whose spire can be seen for miles. In fact the church has no spire and is situated in a dell rather than on a hill. No matter, argues Peter Parker, readers love A Shropshire Lad because of its essential Englishness and evocative descriptions of the generic English rural idyll rather than treating it as a tourist guide to Ludlow and the surrounding area.
Housman Country is structured loosely as part biography (the first 150 pages) and part an analysis and reflection upon Edwardian England and the milieu out of which A Shropshire Lad was written. The biography section is of moderate interest because Housman, as with many poets, only had a moderately interesting life. His unrequited infatuation with Moses Jackson seems to be the psychological driver for much of his poetry, but that affair of the heart aside, Housman comes across as the epitome of the repressed and unhappy Englishman. He comes across as indifferent verging towards rude when it comes to social callers, and obsessively protective of his poetry, refusing to given meaningful answers to enquiries as to its source (understandable, perhaps) and denying any permission for them to be anthologised (although setting them to music was fine provided that the poems weren't printed in programme notes etc.). Parker does his best to get under Housman's skin, but to no avail.
The remaining 250 pages of the book provide more food for thought. Much of this is well-trodden ground - the curious English infatuation with a countryside that 90% no longer live in, and many left precisely to escape the grinding poverty after the late nineteenth century agricultural crash. The Edwardian obsession with youthful male perfection, whether stemming from subliminal homoerotic desire or an over-exposure to classical writers - is well-presented. The carnage of the First World War becomes a dark wish-fulfilment as now every rural village had its own selection of the immortal dead who would not grow old as we who are left grow old. The final chapter, bringing A Shropshire Lad into the Twenty First century, seemed a little hasty and rather tenuous. Morrissey aside, many of the other references seemed of little weight.
Personally I still don't really "get" A Shropshire Lad, although my appreciation has grown as a result of Parker's book. Perhaps its because rural England doesn't exert quite the same hold over me, or perhaps its just that Housman's simple (naive?) poetry doesn't tick my box. Maybe, as Parker suggests, as a heterosexual male I'm just not "in the know". But my personal preferences aside, this book does go some way to explaining what, to my mind, are interesting but not groundbreaking poems, became the bestselling work of poetry in the first half of the Twentieth Century and still seems to bewitch misguided tourists to Shropshire today.
Housman Country is structured loosely as part biography (the first 150 pages) and part an analysis and reflection upon Edwardian England and the milieu out of which A Shropshire Lad was written. The biography section is of moderate interest because Housman, as with many poets, only had a moderately interesting life. His unrequited infatuation with Moses Jackson seems to be the psychological driver for much of his poetry, but that affair of the heart aside, Housman comes across as the epitome of the repressed and unhappy Englishman. He comes across as indifferent verging towards rude when it comes to social callers, and obsessively protective of his poetry, refusing to given meaningful answers to enquiries as to its source (understandable, perhaps) and denying any permission for them to be anthologised (although setting them to music was fine provided that the poems weren't printed in programme notes etc.). Parker does his best to get under Housman's skin, but to no avail.
The remaining 250 pages of the book provide more food for thought. Much of this is well-trodden ground - the curious English infatuation with a countryside that 90% no longer live in, and many left precisely to escape the grinding poverty after the late nineteenth century agricultural crash. The Edwardian obsession with youthful male perfection, whether stemming from subliminal homoerotic desire or an over-exposure to classical writers - is well-presented. The carnage of the First World War becomes a dark wish-fulfilment as now every rural village had its own selection of the immortal dead who would not grow old as we who are left grow old. The final chapter, bringing A Shropshire Lad into the Twenty First century, seemed a little hasty and rather tenuous. Morrissey aside, many of the other references seemed of little weight.
Personally I still don't really "get" A Shropshire Lad, although my appreciation has grown as a result of Parker's book. Perhaps its because rural England doesn't exert quite the same hold over me, or perhaps its just that Housman's simple (naive?) poetry doesn't tick my box. Maybe, as Parker suggests, as a heterosexual male I'm just not "in the know". But my personal preferences aside, this book does go some way to explaining what, to my mind, are interesting but not groundbreaking poems, became the bestselling work of poetry in the first half of the Twentieth Century and still seems to bewitch misguided tourists to Shropshire today.
August 21, 2016
A beautiful extended meditation on Housman’s poetry, its meaning especially to the Great War generation that followed the publication of “A Shropshire Lad” and its continuing impact. It is enjoyably detailed, exploring Housman’s poetry through his life and though landscape that the poems use (although this is often revealed to be the generic English landscape, rather than Shropshire).
There is a chapter on the influence of the poems on English music, which was too detailed for me, and a final chapter on the poetry in recent culture, which felt as if it was overstating the case. However there are very interesting chapters on the appropriation of the poetry during the First World War, as expected, but still in the Second World War, and in the discovery of England as a leisure destination between the wars.
The author states that ‘Housman Country’ is very much more than a tourist-board notion, and in this book I go in search of a landscape that is not merely geographical, but also literary, musical, emotional, even, in the broadest sense, spiritual.
The English landscape defines English poetry (from William Wordsworth’s ‘Daffodils’ to Edward Thomas’s ‘Adlestrop’), English painting (Constable and Turner) and English music (Elgar and Vaughan Williams).
The language can at times be overwrought, such as:
In fact, 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. The cynicism people detected in Housman’s work was merely the obverse of the romantic medal, for what are cynics if not disappointed romantics?
However, I enjoyed the book immensely, skimming those parts that were too detailed for me, appreciating the frequent quotations, not just from Housman’s poetry, but his prose and that of those who were touched by his poetry. I gained a refreshed and deeper impression of the poetry.
One quote from the poetry:
Clay lies still, but blood’s a rover;
Breath’s a ware that will not keep.
Up, lad: when the journey’s over
There’ll be time enough to sleep.
Go read the poetry, read this book to deepen your understanding of its context and read the poetry.
There is a chapter on the influence of the poems on English music, which was too detailed for me, and a final chapter on the poetry in recent culture, which felt as if it was overstating the case. However there are very interesting chapters on the appropriation of the poetry during the First World War, as expected, but still in the Second World War, and in the discovery of England as a leisure destination between the wars.
The author states that ‘Housman Country’ is very much more than a tourist-board notion, and in this book I go in search of a landscape that is not merely geographical, but also literary, musical, emotional, even, in the broadest sense, spiritual.
The English landscape defines English poetry (from William Wordsworth’s ‘Daffodils’ to Edward Thomas’s ‘Adlestrop’), English painting (Constable and Turner) and English music (Elgar and Vaughan Williams).
The language can at times be overwrought, such as:
In fact, 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. The cynicism people detected in Housman’s work was merely the obverse of the romantic medal, for what are cynics if not disappointed romantics?
However, I enjoyed the book immensely, skimming those parts that were too detailed for me, appreciating the frequent quotations, not just from Housman’s poetry, but his prose and that of those who were touched by his poetry. I gained a refreshed and deeper impression of the poetry.
One quote from the poetry:
Clay lies still, but blood’s a rover;
Breath’s a ware that will not keep.
Up, lad: when the journey’s over
There’ll be time enough to sleep.
Go read the poetry, read this book to deepen your understanding of its context and read the poetry.
December 27, 2016
This book isn't one to hurry through. Don't borrow it from a library - buy it. It's a book to live with for a while and explore the different paths leading from it. I asked for it for my birthday as I'm fond of Housman's poetry, then read the Housman biography chapters straightaway in a weekend and I liked them very much. Housman is such a difficult person to warm to and left so much unsaid that it's tempting to guess and imagine, but Parker resists the temptation. His writing is measured and has perspective, and you feel Housman has been kindly and justly managed. I broke off at this point and went and read most of Housman all over again, and then his lecture on poetry and some letters and then Stoppard's Invention of love. It was only after all that that I read the rest of the book, especially the chapter on English pastoral in the 20th century, and got many of the books from Abe books and just spent the autumn reading them. I found so many books I'd never met, some quite dire (some of the Batsford titles in Pilgrims England are not good) and some quite spectacular (WG Hoskins on Leicestershire). I think I'll go on reading it for years to come.
April 8, 2019
Fascinating book that is part biography of A.E. Housman, part history of late Victorian/early Edwardian England, and part literary criticism. It took me forever to read but this wasn’t because the book wasn’t good but was mainly because the book itself led me to other things. For example, there is a very long section on English music that had me stopping every couple of paragraphs to hunt online versions of the pieces mentioned. And the entirety of A Shropshire Lad is included in this book, making it particularly easy to stop and read individual poems as they are mentioned in the text.
Very good book and I highly recommend it.
Very good book and I highly recommend it.
December 6, 2017
Reading this book makes you realize the power of unrequited love. Yet again, Peter Parker proves that he is a master storyteller and never once does the story falter. It starts as a biography but deftly changes genres, talking about music, travel and history that have been highly influenced by the works of a man who loved only one. Parker keeps you invested in the characters, unsurprisingly very few, and as the pages on the right start to thin, you begin to mourn its completion. When I'd finished reading this remarkable book, there was one thing that I really wanted to do; keep everything aside and hug Mr. Housman.
July 30, 2017
A fascinating book which reflected upon the character of A E Housman, his often difficult relationships with others, his lost love and the impact that it had upon him, as well as the significance of his work. A beautifully balanced book which leaves you feeling that you know this enigmatic individual better perhaps than than most of his contemporaries. The book's strengths are many, but I was particularly taken with the reflections upon the rediscovery of English music which is an area via which I personally rediscovered Housman's A Shropshire Lad.
March 28, 2018
At the end of a long winter, this book was just the thing. It's a combination of literary biography and commentary, with all of A Shropshire Lad reprinted in the back. As you'd expect with a book about Housman, there are lots of descriptions of long walks in the English countryside and attention to hills, dales, fens, steeples, etc. There are also a lot of entertaining little diversions thrown in along the way, like the lyrics to the patriotic song "The Roast Beef of Old England" (Henry Fielding).
May 22, 2021
Initially I found this hard going, maybe because I hadn't heard of Houseman and the impact he had on Englishness, melancholy, and hidden homosexuality. However, as I persevered and got into it, I realised what a stubborn old boy he was, who didn't suffer fools at all, didn't understand or wanted to understand women, felt more comfortable in male company, and didn't give a toss if he made money or not. A true English man. I didn't realise how he had influenced and inspired so many people by doing as little as possible. Simply writing about a longing to return whilst admitting to the horror of the now. I still haven't read the Shropshire Lad yet
May 9, 2024
Only read 150 pages or so. Wanted the material on Housman and Shropshire Lad, not the broader cultural discussion.
February 27, 2017
Not what I expected. However an interesting book on Housman's "A Shropshire Lad". The chapter on its influence on WWI generation was particularly good.
September 8, 2017
From economist
September 2, 2016
Hail the London Clay!
Hail the London Clay!
Hail the London Clay!
Rotten to the core.
Hail the London Clay!
Hail the London Clay!
Rotten to the core.
Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews