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Poetry, after all, as Housman contended, “is not the thing said but a way of saying it.”

Housman, who was a professor of Latin there in the early 20th century.

No one paid much attention to the final speaker, Henry himself, who went to the podium and read, inaudibly and without comment, a short poem by A. E. Housman.

Housman and Rupert Brooke, the stirringly patriotic music of Elgar and Vaughan Williams, the doomed Scott Antarctic expedition, the cult of Nature and, not least, Robert Baden-Powell’s creation of the Boy Scouts.

That was the time of Rudyard Kipling’s “long recessional” and A. E. Housman’s “land of lost content.”