The Poet

Abstract

Declining an invitation to a reception at his publisher’s, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson wrote that ‘the fewer there are who are able to connect my face with the name “Lewis Carroll” the happier for me’; and in 1890 he took the extraordinary step of having a circular printed at Oxford stating that ‘he neither claims nor acknowledges any connection with any pseudonym, or with any book that is not published under his own name’.* Housman’s impulse towards the dissociation of his literary personalities never carried him to these lengths; but he maintained a barrier between Professor Housman, whose ‘trade’ was to study and teach Latin and to edit classical texts, and Mr Housman, who, very occasionally, wrote and published poems; and conversational attempts to flatten the barrier could irritate or perhaps scare him into a much-publicized but rather uncharacteristic rudeness. On the other hand, and after all, he chose to publish the poems under his own name and was certainly gratified by the fame they brought him, which he compared to a cushion interposed between himself and the cold ground. So that it will not do to exaggerate the scholar’s reluctance to be recognized as a poet.