A POPULARITY that would have exhilarated many other poets
came to Housman unsought and, it sometimes appeared, against
his wishes. Embarrassed by admiration and repelled by curi-
osity, he persistently averted himself from the consequences of
becoming a successful author. Except for the demand that his
books should be low-priced, and a fussy concern about the
spelling and punctuation of each edition, he lived remote from
the literary world and a recluse from his fame. There was almost
the mark of anonymity about his work: a voice that could not
easily be identified with the outward man. Small in volume and
repetitive in theme, his poetry issued from a hidden source and
was disciplined into a narrow channel. It had the intensity of
a single experience long secreted, which at last forced its way,
as if involuntarily, through all the bars of self-restraint. This
belated trickle of inspiration, seeping out at the onset of middle
age, in defiance of the austere and reticent scholar which Hous-
man had by then become, is the peculiar interest, the unravelled
problem, of a life otherwise so firmly and methodically organ-
ized. He was a remarkable example, even in the Victorian age,
of man's struggle to curb and adapt himself to his environment
--a struggle, in Housman's case, discernible only in the bitter
lyricism of his poetry.

A boy of six when Swinburne dared to flout the conventions
of the period, and a man of thirty-six when Oscar Wilde paid
the penalty for such bravado, Housman grew up in that fortress
of respectability--the mid-Victorian middle class. It was a
society against whose rules of conduct few were tempted to
rebel. But whereas conformity was a yoke to which other poets
more or less unwillingly submitted themselves, conformity was
for Housman the pre-condition of his poetry, the stimulus with-
out which it might never have been written. A prim and decor-
ous personage who "appeared to be descended from a long

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