ABSTRACT
Contemporary critics of Housman’s poetry noted more than once the homosexual connotations of verse that was perceived by many to reflect universal notions of love, compassion, and friendship. Housman would not have seen this universalism as entirely inappropriate, even if his unreciprocated lifelong love for heterosexual Moses Jackson reminded him of the more general cultural infringements on his desire. As students, Housman and Jackson shared rooms at Oxford (along with other classmates) and later worked in the same office in London, sharing lodgings with Jackson’s brother Adalbert. Housman’s desires may have been reciprocated by Adalbert, to whom poems XLI and XLII in More Poems are both tributes.
