Peter Parker (1) (1954–)

This book is half biography and half literary criticism. Its subject is a man and his poems who conjure up a kind of English identity rooted in the streams, hills, copses, spires, towers and market places of late nineteenth century Shropshire. Housman experienced much loss and was probably, like Henry James, a romantically unembraced gay man. The loss haunts his poem A Shropshire Lad. He was a professor of classic and you can sense the lapidary concision of Horace in his beautiful English verse. Parker's book is too long - probably it could have been cut by a third. But for me it is subject matter that is refreshing to visit considering how urban and disconnected to a sense of place the last century has been for us Brits and Australians.… (más)

A beautiful extended meditation on Housman’s poetry, its meaning especially to the Great War generation that followed the publication of “A Shropshire Lad” and its continuing impact. It is enjoyably detailed, exploring Housman’s poetry through his life and though landscape that the poems use (although this is often revealed to be the generic English landscape, rather than Shropshire).

There is a chapter on the influence of the poems on English music, which was too detailed for me, and a final chapter on the poetry in recent culture, which felt as if it was overstating the case. However there are very interesting chapters on the appropriation of the poetry during the First World War, as expected, but still in the Second World War, and in the discovery of England as a leisure destination between the wars.

The author states that ‘Housman Country’ is very much more than a tourist-board notion, and in this book I go in search of a landscape that is not merely geographical, but also literary, musical, emotional, even, in the broadest sense, spiritual.
The English landscape defines English poetry (from William Wordsworth’s ‘Daffodils’ to Edward Thomas’s ‘Adlestrop’), English painting (Constable and Turner) and English music (Elgar and Vaughan Williams).

The language can at times be overwrought, such as:
In fact, 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. The cynicism people detected in Housman’s work was merely the obverse of the romantic medal, for what are cynics if not disappointed romantics?

However, I enjoyed the book immensely, skimming those parts that were too detailed for me, appreciating the frequent quotations, not just from Housman’s poetry, but his prose and that of those who were touched by his poetry. I gained a refreshed and deeper impression of the poetry.

One quote from the poetry:

Clay lies still, but blood’s a rover;
Breath’s a ware that will not keep.
Up, lad: when the journey’s over
There’ll be time enough to sleep.

Go read the poetry, read this book to deepen your understanding of its context and read the poetry.… (más)