In her introduction to Grant Richards’s memoir of her brother, Katharine Symons described the book as ‘not a complete biography of A.E. Housman but a nearly complete biography of his poems’. Housman Country is neither of these things, though it might be described as an account of the life and times of A Shropshire Lad. It is for this reason that the text of Housman’s first volume has been included in this book, and those poems discussed in the text are additionally identified by the Roman numeral each of them bears in order to make them easy to locate. Since many of the poems published in later volumes were drafted or written at the same time as those in A Shropshire Lad or otherwise bear on the narrative, I have often referred to or discussed them. There are innumerable editions of Housman’s collected poems, but all quotations from them in this book are taken from A Shropshire Lad and Other Poems (2010), authoritatively edited by Archie Burnett and readily available as a Penguin paperback or as an e-book. These poems are identified in the notes, once again by the Roman numerals used by Housman, which will make them easy to locate in any edition.
There remain whole areas of Housman’s life and work – notably his career as a classicist – that do not come into this book. Several biographies of Housman, referred to in the text and listed in the bibliography, supply a more comprehensive account for anyone seeking one. Equally, at a time when questions of national identity are being much discussed, ‘Englishness’ here describes something that seemed rather more clearly identifiable during Housman’s lifetime, although it is still recognisable today. My principal intention has been to investigate what I have called ‘Housman Country’, an English sensibility in which literature, landscape, music and emotion all play their part, and which finds one of its most perfect expressions in Housman’s poetry.
Peter Parker, London E3, March 2016