Afrail-Looking, self-absorbed man of letters, A. E. Housman had no attributes visibly suitable for the profession of arms. Nevertheless, soldiering and the accidents of military life fascinated him; and a large number of his poems, including some of his best ones, are on military and warlike themes. This trait of Housman's has not been systematically studied, and casual explanations of it have been contradictory. For example, Norman Marlow asserts that soldiers attracted Housman “by their colourful uniforms and their destiny,” and again because they are “men paid to die,” and in another place, and a higher register, because of their “relentless pursuit of glory” (A. E. Housman: Scholar and Poet, London, 1958, pp. 114, 158). Housman's biographer George L. Watson traces four other causes. Housman found in soldiering “not the glory of the battlefield, but the discipline of the drillmaster”; he loved soldiers for being “not so much heroes as automatons.” Then the fact that a soldier might be “often susceptible to his own sex” appealed to Housman's invert imaginings. Also, says Watson, Housman yearned toward “the gallant bearing and ripe masculinity of men in uniform.” In sharp contrast, he felt through his own disasters “a sense of closer kinship with their unhappy lot” (A. E. Housman: A Divided Life, London, 1958, pp. 59–60, 145).