Preface

Summary

Housman sought no limelight. He deplored the very idea of biography. Renowned for Latin scholarship and famous for his two little books of poetry A Shropshire Lad and Last Poems, he was the pre-eminent textual scholar in Europe, with whom few dared to cross swords. His two books of poetry have never been out of print following their publication in 1896 and 1922; they made him a celebrity. Had Housman been less reticent, less unwilling to capitalise on celebrity, there might have been no need for this biography. Yet he has remained a truly hidden man, captured in the public mind as prim and grim. It is only now that we can see him plain in all his interesting complexity, thanks to the publication of Archie Burnett's two volumes of Letters in 2007. Burnett's 2,327 letters trebled the number of letters available to biographers, not to mention seventy-one new letters resulting from my own researches and quoted here for the first time.

These letters enable us to see a many-sided man, a master of English prose, a witty and compelling after-dinner speaker, an occasional writer of nonsense verse, a frequenter of the music hall, a lover of foreign travel (he was among the earliest travellers by air), a connoisseur of good food and wine and companionable in small groups he was familiar with. In his dealings with others he was frequently generous to a fault, and always on the lookout for humour and fun. He also reveals himself as a man of ambiguity, paradox, irony and wit, inclined to be secretive and sometimes tricky. As a detached and unsentimental observer of human destiny he was a man who commanded attention; he did not waste words.

The most powerful influences on Housman's life were the death of his mother when he was twelve, traumatic failure in his Oxford finals and the fact that he formed a profound emotional and lifelong attachment to a fellow undergraduate, Moses Jackson. These happenings powered his motivation. A job at the Patent Office paid the rent and ten years of spare-time work in the British Museum produced twenty-five papers for learned journals.