those spurts of flame are biographically unavoidable. At the
risk of burning my fingers, therefore, I have chosen to treat the
Collected Poems as something more than a superior but incidental
accomplishment, an exercise irrelevant to the rest of Housman's
life. In this study, on the contrary, his poetry becomes the in-
dispensable key to a personality which even those who knew
him best always confessed to finding adamantine.

The material with which to construct a factual biography of
so reluctant a subject is at best marginal and scanty. A man
who discouraged intimacy and practised extreme self-control,
whose correspondence was crisp and cursory, who forbade the
republication of his occasional writings and who ordered the
destruction of his private papers, does not, by careful design,
lend himself to documentary discoveries. Only his unyielding
mask was turned outward; only bareness and books filled the
space around him, in which others would have stored up the
tell-tale debris of living. Someone has described Housman's
rooms at Trinity as the aesthetic counterpart of a railway station
waiting room. Their authentic furniture--mission oak, a hip
bath, a green turtle's shell--conveyed nothing but his indiffer-
ence to comfort and his contempt for fashion. Like one of
those literary shrines--the author's cottage preserved for pos-
terity--Housman's external life has an air of desertion as one
tries to reanimate it; at its most vivid, the bleakness of a wall
topped with broken glass and posted with No Admittance signs,
beyond which a figure of intimidating silence and unsociability
wards off the rash intruder. Posthumously guarded, moreover,
by that cult of discretion which has locked so many doors in
English literature, Housman is still wrapped in almost inviolate
seclusion.

Across this barrier, if one presumes to have surmounted it,
the material with which to compose a likeness of the inner man,
a biography of the spirit which so obviously underlay those
bristling defences, is even more tenuous and speculative--the
cryptographic evidence of the poems, with not much else except
an assortment of impressions and implications, the scraps,

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