File 614 - Letters from A. E. Housman to W. H. Semple

Thirty-one of these letters were presented to the Housman Society by W. H. Semple’s grandson, Robert Semple, on 9 August 2020, and the Society in turn presented them to the Library on 4 September. They were catalogued soon afterwards. Two further letters (24 and 30) came to the Library via the same channel in July 2021, and the numbering of the other items was adjusted to accommodate them.

This collection contains twenty-eight letters from A. E. Housman to W. H. Semple, together with two related letters by A. F. Scholfield, the University Librarian—one to Semple and one to Housman—and an unrelated memorandum in Semple's hand. The correspondence begins at the time when Semple was a research student at Cambridge and Housman was his supervisor. According to Graves (A. E. Housman: The Scholar-Poet), Semple was the only research student Housman ever supervised.