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“Housman Country: Into the Heart of England”

By Glynn Young 3 Comments

Park Housman Country Peter Parker

In 1896, A.E. Housman (1859-1936) published a poetry collection that might have seemed an unlikely candidate for one of the most popular books of poetry of all time. And yet it was, and is. Pocket editions of A Shropshire Lad were carried into the trenches by British soldiers in World War I. Countless editions were printed from 1896 to well after Housman’s death, and the book is still published today. It was widely read not only in England but also in Canada, Australia, the United States, and many other countries.

It is not about war, and yet it 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.

Housman Country Peter ParkerAuthor 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.

Housman Country Peter Parker

A.E. Housman about the time he wrote “A Shropshire Lad”

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 Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, and Rupert Brooke. But the work became strongly associated with war. “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 by professional soldiers but by volunteers and conscripts, just like those lads from Shropshire.”

Housman Country Peter Parker

Peter Parker

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 a 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.

Related:

The Poems the Soldiers Read in World War I

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Photo by Bob Farrell, Creative Commons, via Flickr. Post by Glynn Young, author of the novels Dancing Priest and A Light Shining, and Poetry at Work.

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Glynn Young
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Glynn Young

Editor and Twitter-Party-Cool-Poem-Weaver at Tweetspeak Poetry
Glynn Young lives in St. Louis where he recently retired as the team leader for Online Strategy & Communications for a Fortune 500 company. Glynn writes poetry, short stories and fiction, and he loves to bike. He is the author of Poetry at Work and the Dancing Priest Series. Find Glynn at Faith, Fiction, Friends.
Glynn Young
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Latest posts by Glynn Young (see all)

  • “Chaucer: A European Life” by Marion Turner - December 3, 2019
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  • W.H. Auden’s “September 1, 1939″ – The Biography of a Poem by Ian Sansom - November 19, 2019

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Comments

  1. Bethany R. says

    August 22, 2017 at 9:59 am

    Thanks for pointing out Peter Parker’s explanation that, “’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…” That idea quite relatable, as it carries over into many aspects of life and relationships.

    Reply
  2. Sandra Heska King says

    August 23, 2017 at 10:32 am

    I took a few minutes to skim through the book preview, stopping at a couple of spots. Like where Housman talked about pieces of poems coming to him during two- to three-hour afternoon walks. Like how many of us allow ourselves that kind of time?

    Also… “Poetry is not the thing said but a way of saying it.” He “suggested that those who had admired Wordsworth in the nineteenth century did so for the wrong reasons: ‘they were most attracted to what may be called his philosophy’, while remaining largely deaf to what was far more important, ‘that thrilling utterance which pierces the heart and brings tears to the eyes of thousands who care nothing for his opinions and beliefs’. “

    Reply

Trackbacks

  1. Poetry, World War I, and Armistice Day - says:
    November 6, 2018 at 5:00 am

    […] Three books take World War I poetry, and the war itself, into a deeper understanding. Mary Egremont’s Some Desperate Glory: The First World War the Poets Knew details the war as experienced by the men who wrote the poetry. The poetry most read by the soldiers themselves was A Shropshire Lad by A.E. Housman. And writer Peter Parker explores A Shropshire Lad in scholarly depth and research in Housman Country: Into the Heart of England. […]

    Reply

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