Housman Country: Into the Heart of England

Peter Parker

iyn 2017 · Macmillan + ORM

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“Parker’s beautiful Housman Country tells you everything you want to know about the life and influence of England’s most satirised but inimitable poets.” —Evening Standard

A New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice

Nominated for the 2017 PEN/Bograd Weld Prize for Biography

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.

“[A] rich blend of literary criticism and cultural history.” —The Spectator

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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.