Housman Country: Into the Heart of England - Softcover

Parker, Peter

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0349140685 ISBN 13: 9780349140681

Publisher: Abacus, 2017

Synopsis

Why is it that for many people 'England' has always meant an unspoilt rural landscape rather than the ever-changing urban world in which most English people live? What was the 'England' for which people fought in two world wars? What is about the English that makes them constantly hanker for a vanished past, so that nostalgia has become a national characteristic?

In March 1896 a small volume of sixty-three poems was published by the small British firm of Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co. Ltd in an edition of 500 copies, priced at half-a-crown each. The author was not a professional poet, but a thirty-seven-year-old professor of Latin at University College, London called Alfred Edward Housman who had been obliged to pay £30 towards the cost of publication. Although slow to sell at first,A Shropshire Ladwent on to become one of the most popular books of poetry ever published and has never been out of print. As well as being a publishing phenomenon, the book has had an influence on English culture and notions of what 'England' means, both in England itself and abroad, out of all proportion to its apparent scope.

Housman Countrywill not only look at howA Shropshire Ladcame to be written and became a publishing and cultural phenomenon, but will use the poems as a prism through which to examine England and Englishness. The book contains a full transcript of A Shropshire lad itself, also making it a superb present.

About this title

About the Author:

Peter Parker was born in Herefordshire and educated in the Malverns, Dorset and London. He is the author ofThe Last Veteran,The Old Lie: The Great War and the Public-School Ethosand biographies of J.R. Ackerley and Christopher Isherwood . He was an associate editor ofThe Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, and writes about books and gardening for a wide variety of newspapers and magazines. He lives in London's East End.

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 this edition

• Publisher: Abacus
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 0349140685
• ISBN 13: 9780349140681
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 624