The two products of Housman's life have had very different fates. His great work of textual scholarship like many traditional crafts has become less relevant to life today. Like other scientific research, classical scholarship is prone to being overtaken by new discoveries and re-evaluations. In a book on Propertius published by a Fellow of St Anne's College Oxford in 2001 the name Housman appeared in only six places, and in one note Housman was put firmly in his place, by a woman too. The scholarship, at which he laboured so long and devotedly, was a self-directed vocational impulse. It produced a great contribution to Latin scholarship but was in essence a surrogate life.

Housman's poetry still maintains its position among the most quoted and most remembered poetry in the language. In Yeats’ phrase, it is poetry that has gone ‘into the general memory’ because of its instant accessibility and memorability. Although published in 1896 A Shropshire Lad speaks to the problems of today, speaks eloquently of the painful mutability of human relationships, and speaks in a confronting yet comforting way about the inevitability of death, a subject contemporary man seeks generally to avoid. When he voices his outrage at the laws of God and Man which deny him the freedom to be as he was made, he speaks to one of today's most threatening problems – the still lethal effects of intolerance. Housman's poetry is susceptible and responsive to changes in society and changes in its readers so that in a more tolerant society some of Housman's poems, classified in anthologies as love poems, can be read as they were intended, from man to man.

What of the man and his journey through life, what has that left us? Not wishing to join the herd, unafraid of silence, he is in stark contrast to those who always place themselves centre stage, the extroverts, the energetic communicators, the mere talkers. His brother Laurence remembered him as ‘a shy, proud and reticent character; even to his intimates he was provokingly reserved.’ But Laurence also confessed ‘I myself knew very little of his life in its day-to-day activities.’