Star man

Housman is not the only poet in the nineteenth century to have been part of a living orrery; evidence uncovered by Nicholas Roe suggests that Keats enjoyed similar educative games at Enfield School, where each pupil was given a card listing key facts about specific planets (“I represent the grand Georgium Sidus . . . I move round the Sun in about 83 years, and at the distance of 1,800,000,000 miles”), and then put into orbit around a classmate representing “the great Sun”. But it seems significant that Housman, as well as taking part, was also the bossy god who created this mini-universe and set it in motion. For whereas most people grow out of the desire to have whole worlds at their command, just as they grow out of tending ant-farms or using train-sets to stage elaborate crashes, Housman might better be thought to have grown into it. His inaugural lecture as Professor of Latin in Cambridge pointed out that the boy who makes mud pies shares “in modest measure the activities of the demiurge”, as he sets out to “evoke a small world out of a small chaos; let him also behold the work of his hands and pronounce it, if he can, to be pretty good”, and he exercised similar talents in his twin lives as classical scholar and poet.