Housman Country: Into the Heart of England

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 k [...]
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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."