Whatever Housman thought, the Leslie Stephen Lecture had heightened his public profile and enhanced his public reputation.

Reviews and comment were almost wholly congratulatory, although he was used by some to support their personal agendas. For its September 1933 issue, Scrutiny had asked one Gorley Putt to review The Name & Nature of Poetry with two other books under the ironic caption ‘Go to the Professors’. He wrote:

Housman would be used as a stick to beat the moderns and as an object of scorn by the defenders of the moderns, even though his lecture had made no specific attack on the quality of any contemporary poet.

T.S. Eliot speaks

In great contrast was T.S. Eliot's review in The Criterion, an influential literary magazine founded in 1922. With his background in foreign exchange and his business experience as a director of the publishing house Faber and Faber, his review displayed a worldly, fair-minded and analytical assessment of Housman's lecture. He was prepared to make his points quietly and diplomatically. He had understood perfectly where Housman was coming from and seems to have appreciated how Housman had cleverly positioned himself on the unassailable ground of personal opinion.

He opened with a compliment. Housman was a master of prose because of what Eliot identified as ‘a certain emotional intensity’ – which would please Housman. He cleverly positioned Housman both as a romantic poet and an eighteenth-century wit – which would also please Housman. He acknowledged the inherent limitations of the public lecture which calls for selection and not ‘connected profundity’, thereby outlawing blame for what Housman had not said.

Elected Professor of Latin at Cambridge and fellow of Trinity College

The notice of a vacancy at Cambridge was published over the name of the Vice-Chancellor, R.F. Scott, in the Cambridge University Reporter on 12 December 1910:

How different the process was from that of University College! This time no testimonials were called for; the University archive contains no list of applicants, no arguments between the electors on the merits of the various candidates, no final report. There is nothing other than a bald statement:

The statement was signed by each of the eleven Electors of whom the most eminent were the Vice-Chancellor R.F. Scott, the Regius Professor of Greek Henry Jackson, the Public Orator J.E. Sandys, the Professor of Sanskrit E.J. Rapson and The Professor of Latin in the University of Oxford Robinson Ellis.

What is immediately noticeable is that two of the electors, Jackson and Ellis, had supported Housman at the University College election and that he has another Cambridge supporter, Arthur Verrall, a senior fellow of Trinity.

It is a reasonable assumption that on this occasion Henry Jackson was the kingmaker, just as W.P. Ker and John Postgate had been the joint kingmakers at University College, London, and that Jackson and Verrall were chiefly instrumental in getting Housman elected as a fellow of Trinity. Henry Jackson was a leader, a forward looking man, gregarious and persuasive and had a powerful presence. R. St John Parry, his successor as Vice-Master at Trinity, wrote of him:

The road to academic failure

In October 1877 Housman was going up to Oxford from a small town in Worcestershire on the southern fringes of the Black Country, a provincial boy from a family who would have had difficulty in supporting him without his scholarship. He had come from a relatively obscure school to a monumental and imposing Oxford college. Almost twenty years earlier, his uncle Joseph Brettell Housman (he who would soon buy the Housman family home) had won a scholarship from Bromsgrove School to Oxford's Worcester College, but whereas Housman's was an open scholarship at St John's, his uncle's had been a closed scholarship, that is one restricted to pupils of his own school. After two years of not living up to the description of ‘scholar’, Joseph suffered the ignominy of being deprived of his scholarship.

Housman was going up to Oxford without the advantage of relatives who had made their mark; he had nobody to lubricate his entrance; nor was he entering a ready-made network of former pupils from his own school, as could be the case with students from big well-known schools, such as Eton, Winchester, Westminster or Shrewsbury. He had first to make friends in his own college, look out for himself and make his own way forward.

He was without sporting prowess which could have provided him with an alternative route to social connections and self-expression. He was without money which would have enabled him, had he had such ambitions, to aim for the upper pinnacles of Oxford's social and political life. Having shone during his school days, his most likely expectation was that he would go on shining.

Only thirteen letters survive to record the events of his life at Oxford. Together they show no lack of willingness on his part to engage with what was around him. But far from recording awestruck impressions of Oxford, its personages and ceremonies, he was generally scornful. When he went with the other St John's freshmen to be matriculated (entered on the university register), a tutor told each one how to write his name in Latin – in his case, Alfredus Edwardus Housman. They then walked down St Giles along Broad Street, past the Sheldonian Theatre and into New College.

Housman was dead and buried but he was to have an immediate afterlife as a poet. He had appointed his brother Laurence as his literary executor:

Laurence both obeyed and disobeyed his elder brother. He took his brother's words as a green light to publish what he wished.

Before the year was out, Laurence published More Poems, a collection of forty-nine poems. Most existed in manuscript and four had been published before. However, Laurence cobbled together five verses from one of his brother's notebooks and three verses from another notebook, to make a single poem. He also combined three separate and seemingly unrelated quatrains to make another poem. Laurence seems broadly to have done his duty but could not resist the temptation to add his own creative touches.

A year later, in 1937, Laurence published his A.E.H., containing twenty-three additional poems. Of these, all but four were backed by manuscripts, yet again Laurence could not resist his own creative impulse, using two separate fragments from the notebooks to create a single poem, and publishing seven poems of only four lines each.

Laurence further disobeyed his instructions by not destroying the four notebooks; instead he tore them apart, discarded some sheets, cut up the remainder and pasted down the pieces on larger sheets. This is not the place to elaborate on that process or its results. Suffice to say the final resting place of the mutilated notebooks was mainly in the United States Library of Congress where ‘165 folio sheets arranged in 7 groupings … 266 manuscript pieces … glued to 149 of the sheets’ provided a textual mishmash for scholars and literary archaeologists to puzzle over. Laurence had created just the sort of textual mess Housman had worked all his life to avoid.

During April 1922, Housman was hard at work, creating as many as six new poems and bringing seventeen more into a finished state. He kept this industry hidden from Richards and instead concentrated on a debate of petty wine snobberies. ‘I knew already, having been told, that it is wrong to have one's wine brought in a cradle, and now I know further that it is wrong to decant it; so in future I shall just have the cork drawn, and suck the liquid out of the bottle through a tube.’

And then suddenly came the day Richards had been waiting for. Housman wrote on 9 April 1922: ‘It is now practically certain that I shall have a volume of poems ready for the autumn; so I wish you would take what steps are necessary as soon as they are necessary.’ He was clearly working through the poems he intended to include and asked about the legal position of Illic Jacet which had already been published in The Academy in 1900. Ten days later he was asking for the deadline for sending Richards the complete manuscript and expressing a particular desire that the price should be moderate. Less than ten days after that he was firming up on a publication date.

Almost as an afterthought he wrote ‘when you next print A Shropshire Lad I want to make two alterations’. On this occasion they were not matters of punctuation but of wording. To change words after twenty-seven years seems strange, indeed suggesting that his gestating mind had suddenly decided that he now preferred other wordings which his notebooks show he had rejected almost a quarter of a century earlier. The changes were ‘loose’ for ‘thick’ in the third stanza of ‘The winds out of the west land blow’ and ‘no more remembered’ for ‘long since forgotten’ in the third stanza of ‘Far in a western brookland’. As part of his preparation for selecting poems for Last Poems he must have been carefully re-reading A Shropshire Lad.

By the end of April he was approving a specimen page of Last Poems. He had been quite clear on the layout. ‘The poems should not be run on, as originally in A Shropshire Lad, but each should start on a fresh page.’ By 19 June he was sending Richards his fifty-page manuscript.

The leap that Housman now made from the bondage of the Patent Office seems so extraordinary and reveals so much about how Housman was seen by others that it needs to be laid out in all its glory.

On 15 February 1892 W.P. Ker, who had been appointed Quain Professor of English Language and Literature at University College London in 1889, became the key that unlocked the door of the Patent Office and enabled Housman to escape and re-enter the formal world of classical scholarship. Alfred Godwin, Professor of Greek and Latin, had died earlier in the month, and Ker had been appointed chairman of a committee ‘to consider the whole question of the teaching of both Latin and Greek at the college’. A shake–up was intended and Ker was just the man to see it through. Within a week his committee had produced its report. It opted for a professor in each subject. These professorships were advertised in the newspapers on 19 March, applications had to be in by the end of April, appointments were expected to be made by June and the new professors would take up their posts in October 1892.

The status and opportunity provided by the posts had obvious and intrinsic attractions for Housman but appointment would also represent improvement in his personal finances. According to the handout:

By now Housman was on his maximum of £400 a year at the Patent Office so a ten per cent increase in pay to £436 a year would be a significant incentive to add to the other attractions of the post.

When Housman wrote to Robert Bridges on 28 December 1928, the feast of the Holy Innocents as he called it, he informed him ‘I am myself engaged on one of my serious works, the fifth and last volume of Manilius. It ought to be out in a year's time, and then I shall have done what I came on earth to do, and can devote the rest of my days to religious meditation.’ Some chance, you might say.

On the same day, he had rapidly to come down to earth to deal with Percy Withers who, judging from Housman's reply, was feeling left out. Housman deftly turned the tables on him: ‘Christmas generally brings me a certain amount of abuse for being a bad letter writer, but nobody else makes such a moan as you do; so I suppose your feelings towards me are especially tender.’ Having smoothed ruffled feathers, Housman told him about his stay at the ‘luxurious Pavillon Henri Quatre’, his motor tours around Paris, his summer stays in south-west England, the many fine abbeys and churches he saw there, and their architectural detail.

A couple of days later he exhibited the caring side of his character. A.C Pearson was about to retire as Regius Professor of Greek. Housman, an elector for his replacement, was thinking about Pearson's feelings and wanted to help smooth his transition into retirement:

The Richards Press had been trying to lure him into limited editions of his poetry with a promise of financial gain. Housman reacted with a deep visceral rejection of money grubbing: ‘I have a dislike to limited editions. I know there is money in them, but I cannot stoop.’ Possibilities for limited editions were being offered from other directions; he refused to be a party to an edition of signed copies proposed by the Windsor Press of San Francisco.

Failure in Greats

When they saw his papers, the examiners – Bywater, Macan, Richards and Bidder – were shocked. Only one of them, Bidder, had actually taught Housman and none of his other college lecturers was an examiner, although they seem to have been informed of Housman's situation before the results were announced. Pollard later recalled that when he went up to Oxford for his viva (oral examination), which customarily takes place between the written examination and the announcement of results, he found his examiners bewildered

The fact that the examiners did not wish to viva Housman for a second or third or fourth class degree, shows how awful, empty or insulting his papers must have been. He may have allowed his contempt for some of the questions to shine through or may have deployed his coruscating and sardonic wit in his answers. Canon Nance, a St John's lecturer, said that on the philosophical side ‘his performance had been so ludicrously bad as to show that he had not made any effort, and to give the examiners the impression that he was treating that part of the business with contempt’. Pollard said nothing about Housman's possible distress at his father's stroke, nothing about bad blood between Housman and his tutors, nothing about Moses Jackson and gave no other reason than his preoccupation with Propertius for Housman's neglect of the syllabus. Housman himself later told Andrew Gow that his examiners ‘had no option’.

The return of Housman's muse

It is now time to return to the main thread of the narrative and observe what was happening to the poetic thread in Housman's life. In 1900 Housman's muse returned.

Five years had elapsed since he had sent A Shropshire Lad for publication. Between 1900 and 1905 he experienced a new surge of poetic activity that produced twenty-six poems. Between 1917 and 1922 he wrote another eighteen. In 1922 he had a total of forty-four new poems. He would eventually include only seventeen of them in Last Poems.

Four of them were soldier poems, Grenadier, Lancer, The Deserter, and Astronomy reflecting the impact of the Boer war on his choice of subject matter in the years 1899 to 1902. Astronomy was evidently biographical and related to his brother Herbert killed in that war: factually, he was not in a poetic drought, whatever he might say to other people.

Housman and his stepmother

Long letters he sent to his stepmother reflect his wish to entertain her. The effort he put into them showed his need for a continuing mother figure, even a stepmother. In September 1904 he wrote vividly about his visit to Constantinople, about Turkish graveyards and tombstones, which made ‘the downs look as if they were sprinkled with large hailstones or coarse grained salt’. His sunsets were atmospheric:

He went on at length about animals he saw, white oxen, black buffaloes and sheep,

Firstborn

Alfred Edward Housman, the first child of Edward Housman and his wife Sarah Jane Williams, did not make a totally uncomplicated entry to this life. The local doctor, alarmed by unusual pains and no doubt regarding Sarah Jane, then thirty-one, as a rather elderly prima gravida, wanted to call in a specialist from Birmingham. Sarah Jane took command and insisted that the Williams’ family doctor, who had known her all her life and, as she put it, ‘knew me’, should be sent for to take charge of the birth. Some husbands might have played safe and backed the doctor's recommendation. There is no indication that Edward did so. Sarah Jane prevailed, the first indication that she would be the leader in the family, Edward the led; her own doctor was summoned and Alfred was born soon after on 26 March 1859.

Sarah Jane had conceived at the first possible moment. After Alfred's birth, three more children – Robert, Clemence and Katharine (generally known as Kate) – followed at annual intervals, a tribute to their parents’ fertility and uninhibited lovemaking. Her fifth child, Basil, was born two years later; her sixth, Laurence, a year after that; her seventh and last child, George (generally known as Herbert), three years later in July 1868. Seven children in nine years proved her Victorian capacity for stoical childbearing and Christian duty.

Loses his mother on his twelfth birthday

About a year after the birth of her final child Sarah Jane was diagnosed with breast cancer and died in 1871 at the shockingly early age of forty-two. Had the adult Housman been asked by a psychologist to which of his parents he had been closer, he would undoubtedly have replied, ‘my mother’. The profound and traumatic effect of her death cannot be overestimated. It was the first great circumstantial shock that shaped his life. He, the eldest of her sons, closest to her in every sense, lost her on his twelfth birthday. Moreover, he had been so distressed at seeing her in the late stages of her illness that he had been persuaded to leave home and go some forty miles south to his godmother's family home, Woodchester House, near Stroud in Gloucestershire. None of the hopeful and optimistic forecasts of the grown-ups were borne out.

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.

Destination Paris, Brive and the Limousin

In July 1919 Housman was thinking of touring again in France with Paris, Brive and the Limousin in his sights. He intended leaving his travels until after the end of August because ‘August heat in France might put my health out of order again’. Richards earned further credit from Housman as his ‘guardian angel’ for taking charge of getting him a visa. Richards was always willing to go the extra mile to be of service to his author. Such care and attention helped to cement their relationship. Housman also made the effort to stay with the Richards for two nights on his way home. Housman was now in a position of being able to smooth the rough edges of travel by using hire cars: ‘After my sacrifices for my country during the war I am beginning to spend money on myself instead of saving it up for the Welsh miners’, a reference to the money he had sent to the Chancellor of the Exchequer at the beginning of the war and the Welsh miners who were threatening to strike as a protest against new income tax regulations. He was also revealing himself as willing to fit in with others, go out of his way to see friends and take on more complexity than many others would at the end of a holiday.

During Housman's tour, he kept in touch with Richards, writing to him from Brive, characteristically always planning ahead and never falling into the stereotype of the absent-minded don. When Richards turned up unexpectedly in Paris on business, Housman wrote to him from the Hotel Terminus:

It is surprising to find that Housman was so fully occupied, but it is more surprising to find that he did not seek to involve Richards in his plans or give any indication of what they were. Housman was showing his enigmatic side; the content of his communications seemed always to be governed by the principle of ‘need to know’.