Peter Parker’s new book, “Housman Country: Into the Heart of England” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)-which helpfully includes the text of “A Shropshire Lad” in an appendix-is partly a brisk, sensible biography of Housman and partly a study in poetic reputation. “He is a strange phenomenon,” Ted Hughes said of Housman, “but to my mind the most perfect expression of something deeply English and a whole mood of English history.”
Some of Emily Dickinson’s brief lyrics come closest-tonally, and in their mastery of the short, compressed line-but she has never quite attained Housman’s popularity, and the landscape she wrote about, the one inside her own head, could hardly be said to have created a sense of national identity. We don’t have anything remotely like it in American lit. Somehow, these sixty-three short lyrics, celebrating youth, loss, and early death, became for generations of readers the perfect evocation not merely of what it feels like to be adolescent and a little emotional but of what it means to be English. But the real source of his fame is a single small volume of poetry, “A Shropshire Lad,” which has never been out of print since it was published, in 1896. Housman was so shy and furtive that Max Beerbohm once compared him to “an absconding cashier.” For such a crabbed and elusive figure, though, he continues to draw a surprising amount of attention: books, articles, musical tributes, even a Broadway play, Tom Stoppard’s “The Invention of Love.” Academics know him the way he is mostly depicted in that play-as a formidable classicist, probably the greatest of his generation. Readers have long found in “A Shropshire Lad” what they wanted to find.
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