The English Country Estate and the Landscape’s Nation

Abstract

When considering the development of secular architecture and the reorganization of the perception of landscape through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as a means of expressing national ideas, we need to confront particular generic models and conventions. As we saw in Chapter 1, Niklaus Pevsner’s highly influential Reith lecture for the BBC in 1955 entitled “The Englishness of English Art” was an attempt to identify specific fundamental traits intrinsic to the nation that were manifest in certain forms of cultural production. During that special moment of national reconstruction after WWII, Pevsner argued that distinctive and enduring characteristics of English art such as “the Flaming Line” and the profundity of Perpendicularity were, across centuries, written and built into the national consciousness. A year or so after Pevsner’s lecture, G. R. Hibbard began his formative article, “The Country House Poem of the Seventeenth Century,” by drawing another line. Through the poetry of the early seventeenth century there runs a thin but clearly defined tradition of poems in praise of the English country house and of the whole way of life of which the country house was the centre. Once the line is recognized, there emerges a homogenous body of poetry which is not only a considerable achievement in its own right, marked as it is, by strong ethical thought and by a certain sobriety and weight of utterance, but which is also of peculiar interest to all who are concerned about the relation of poetry to the society from which it springs.1