Laurence Housman represents the fulfillment of the poet's request
to his brother that all poems unfinished or below a certain standard
should be destroyed.

Later the manuscripts were removed from the folios, cleaned of
adhesive, and repaired, hinged and remounted on the original folio
sheets, by which means they will better stand the wear of time. The
order of the pieces as arranged when received was not disturbed.

The rough drafts show that the best of A. E. H's poetry came
with the most difficulty, and the handwriting of these particular
poems shows the stress under which the poet produced them. The
lines of very personal poems, such as A Shropshire Lad XXX and
XXXIII, are typical examples of drafts which in the handwriting,
marginal notes, words rejected, and erasures or obliterations, testify
to the "great excitement" that A. E. H. said had possessed him dur-
ing the time he wrote A Shropshire Lad, and also furnish signifi-
cant biographical material.

Since many of the poems were written in fragments--often one
or two lines or a four line stanza appearing totally unrelated to the
poem it became a part of ultimately--separate indices were pre-
pared by the Library of Congress for the sections of Housman's
poetry as it has appeared in published form. The entire collection
was microfilmed in August, 1947. However, these fragments must
not be called "unpublished lines." They were merely work-shop
bits to be completed. Very few lines or quatrains are in the collection
which did not appear in new form in The Collected Poems of A. E.
Housman, Jonathan Cape, London, 1939.

I corresponded with Laurence Housman from 1949 to 1951, and
during this passage of letters, a plan was formed for me to visit him
in England and to gather first hand information about A. E. Hous-
man from him and from others. My summer at "Longmeadow"
with the Housmans furnished the basis of truth about his life with-

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