When he returned to Cambridge in 1929, Ludwig Wittgenstein chose rooms in the Gothic tower that looks down on Whewell's Court, east of the older parts of Trinity College. The rooms below Wittgenstein's had been occupied for years by the Kennedy Professor of Latin, Alfred Edward Housman, who had come to be regarded as the preeminent Latin scholar of his generation. They had little in common. Housman was the author of more than 100 publications. Wittgenstein published only a single paper and a book, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, which sustained his reputation at the cutting edge of contemporary philosophy long after he had repudiated its method and conclusions. Wittgenstein shunned Trinity's "High Table" and the Cambridge dining clubs so much a part of Housman's college life. Both Housman and Wittgenstein, however, uncompromisingly pursued linguistic accuracy according to their different perceptions of the nature of language itself, and both were homosexual.

Richard Graves describes the indirect path by which Housman came to the Kennedy Professorship in the first quarter of this biography. In subsequent chapters he analyzes Housman's poetry, traces his professional career at the University of London and Trinity College