The poet AE Housman, author of ‘A Shropshire Lad’, is associated with a certain kind of English nostalgia, but the truth is more complicated, argues this fine and wide-ranging study
It’s easy to see why AE Housman might appeal to supporters of Brexit. With his deep attachment to England and its countryside, he evokes the same feelings the out lobby played on: pride, patriotism and nostalgia for the kind of unspoilt landscape – streams, farms, woods, spires, green pastures and windy wealds – that people think of as quintessentially English. Such sentiments, Peter Parker remarks in this excellent book, have become a “comfort blanket for adults in which they can wrap themselves against the chill winds of the present”. But as he points out, Housman’s poems, closely read, offer no such consolation. The “land of lost content” will never be regained; its “blue remembered hills” exist only in the memory; its “happy highways” are ones to which we “cannot come again”.
As Ted Hughes said, Housman’s poems “have entered the national consciousness”. But as a go-to poet for xenophobes, he can’t help but disappoint. His poems may be scattered with local place-names but his range is global and his tone the inverse of roast-beef heartiness. “The essential business of poetry,” he said, “is to harmonise the sadness of the universe.” Love is elusive; life is fleeting; God no longer exists – those are his recurrent themes. His attachment to the nation is less pervasive than his awareness of “the nation that is not”, AKA death, where “revenges are forgot / And the hater hates no more”.
As a go-to poet for xenophobes, he can’t help but disappoint
Related: Autobiography by Morrissey – review
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