Housman Country: into the heart of England
PETER PARKER

Peter Parker sets himself an ambitious task, an “exploration of England and Englishness” that looks at the life, context and influence of A. E. Housman’s poetry. He investigates what he describes as “an English sensibility in which literature, landscape, music and emotion all play their part”. This is highly contested territory; although Housman Country was conceived long before the EU referendum which recently exposed such deep divisions, Parker clearly wrote with an eye on that gathering debate.

He sets off briskly with a wealth of detail on the editorial history of A Shropshire Lad, the cycle of 63 poems Housman published at his own expense in 1896; very quickly, the road veers across country. Discussion follows, seamlessly, of what Orwell thought the collection was about; of what kind of solace it brought to those whose sons had been killed in the First World War; of Housman’s use of Shropshire place names; of Ernest Barker’s 1927 National Character and the Factors in its Formation, which is liberally, and uncritically, quoted; and of the old cliché about the “sexual and emotional repression of the English”. All this before a sudden dive into Anglo-Saxon poetry, Dryden, Fielding, Hazlitt, Mrs C. F. Alexander, Spencer and Quiller-Couch. It’s an unsettling group of cultural bedfellows.