During April 1922, Housman was hard at work, creating as many as six new poems and bringing seventeen more into a finished state. He kept this industry hidden from Richards and instead concentrated on a debate of petty wine snobberies. ‘I knew already, having been told, that it is wrong to have one's wine brought in a cradle, and now I know further that it is wrong to decant it; so in future I shall just have the cork drawn, and suck the liquid out of the bottle through a tube.’

And then suddenly came the day Richards had been waiting for. Housman wrote on 9 April 1922: ‘It is now practically certain that I shall have a volume of poems ready for the autumn; so I wish you would take what steps are necessary as soon as they are necessary.’ He was clearly working through the poems he intended to include and asked about the legal position of Illic Jacet which had already been published in The Academy in 1900. Ten days later he was asking for the deadline for sending Richards the complete manuscript and expressing a particular desire that the price should be moderate. Less than ten days after that he was firming up on a publication date.

Almost as an afterthought he wrote ‘when you next print A Shropshire Lad I want to make two alterations’. On this occasion they were not matters of punctuation but of wording. To change words after twenty-seven years seems strange, indeed suggesting that his gestating mind had suddenly decided that he now preferred other wordings which his notebooks show he had rejected almost a quarter of a century earlier. The changes were ‘loose’ for ‘thick’ in the third stanza of ‘The winds out of the west land blow’ and ‘no more remembered’ for ‘long since forgotten’ in the third stanza of ‘Far in a western brookland’. As part of his preparation for selecting poems for Last Poems he must have been carefully re-reading A Shropshire Lad.

By the end of April he was approving a specimen page of Last Poems. He had been quite clear on the layout. ‘The poems should not be run on, as originally in A Shropshire Lad, but each should start on a fresh page.’ By 19 June he was sending Richards his fifty-page manuscript.