Whither Housman?

I've been chewing over this Guardian blog post for a few days, ever since a family friend sent it on.  In sum, the author, Alex Larman, finds that A. E. Housman has "fallen out of fashion," bemoans the lack of a serious new biography (given that, as Larman has to admit, Housman's life lacked...adventure), and posits that he could perhaps be recuperated by reading him as a "queer writer."  And yet, Larman himself hits on the problem: "He was unfortunate in that he was neither a flashy aesthete nor a daring modernist, producing old-fashioned verse that used simple forms and unflashy language to evoke time, place and mood with consummate skill."  But...surely this makes Housman the kind of poet you would expect to "fall out of fashion"? Housman is indeed a technically skilled poet, witty (even at his own expense, as in the self-parody that opens "Terence, This is Stupid Stuff"), good at ringing the changes on such eternal themes as melancholy, death and forgetfulness, and the ephemerality of love.  As one of the commenters to Larman's post points out, Housman's sensibility is very close to Hardy's (especially when Hardy is in this sort of poetic mood; Housman had earlier published a couple of similar poems in A Shropshire Lad).*  He is, in other words, a fine, effective poet, often accessible to undergraduates in ways that his contemporaries just as often are not.  Nevertheless--as Larman has just conceded!--he's an unadventurous poet.  Even when Housman steps away briefly from his favored iambic or trochaic tetrameter and trimeter stanzas, with or without the occasional anapest, he tends to look backwards (e.g., a couple of poems written in fourteeners).    He prefers quatrains and rhyming couplets; read aloud, the poems sound "quiet," but as Frank Kermode notes, contemporary composers immediately saw their possibilities.  Yet this is all very conventional not just by 1890s standards or Modernist standards, but by 1850s standards.  Set Housman next to any of the major poets from the Victorian period--say, Robert Browning, Lord Tennyson, Matthew Arnold, G. M. Hopkins, A. C. Swinburne, Christina Rossetti,  perhaps Elizabeth Barrett Browning--and his use of form, meter, and language will still seem, as Larman says, "old-fashioned."    Note that this is not a matter of abstruseness or other high difficulty; it's a matter of experimenting and taking risks.  While adventurousness may lead to the literary-historical equivalent of crashing and burning (Spasmodics, anyone?), doing the poetic version of staying "[a]t home," as AEH says to Wilde in The Invention of Love, can't help but make the poet recede into the crowd a bit.**  Housman is hardly going to disappear, precisely because he is such a readable poet, but the "dullness" of his existence really can't be blamed for his slight fade-out.

*--The point had been made before. 

**--Tom Stoppard, The Invention of Love (New York: Grove Press, 1997), 97.