William Earnest Henley is best known these days as the author of the blank verse Invictus¹. Henley is often reviled as an imperial jingo, unjustly so as explained here. Henley was a man of his time and a product of his life.

Henley was born in the year 1849, living his life until death in 1903 by which time he was renowned in English literary circles as an editor and author. During his youth he contracted a tubercular infection of his foot; medicine as it was then dictated amputation of the limb to check spread of the disease. Though his family was poor, he was encouraged in his education such that he aspired to literary life. Unfortunately, tubercular infection spread to his remaining foot.

Prognosis for Henley was amputation, which he was loath to accept. He had heard of Dr Joseph Lister and his antiseptic methods. Henley scraped together the money to buy a passage by ship from where he was being treated at Margate, Kent, to Edinburgh, Scotland. In the year 1873 at Edinburgh he put himself under the care of Lister who was then senior surgeon at the Royal Infirmary.

Henley spent 21 months in hospital. Lister saved his foot. Henley read and wrote, contributing to the Cornhill Magazine where he attracted the attention of the editor Leslie Stephen. Stephen visited Henley in hospital and it was he who introduced Robert Louis Stevenson to Henley. It was while Henley was in hospital, impecunious and without a future or means of support that he wrote his hospital verses and Invictus in particular.

Of the available biographies WE Henley by John Connell is the most readable. Henley is very much a man to admire, something one can do with Connell's biography, which puts the reader in touch with Henley through good use of his correspondence. Connell's biography is much better than that by Kennedy Williamson. Connell's work is compelling reading that can be done in those easy stages that leave one with the pleasant anticipation of rejoining good companions.

Why should Fu-Manchu like Henley so much? Mainly because Henley was a strong, forthright man who would brook no nonsense. He was an implacable enemy to cant and champion of plain speaking and writing. We need Henley now, more than ever, to lead the fight against the mealy-mouthed cant of the politically correct.

Henley became editor of the Scots Observer. On 6 March 1890, he published a review of Havelock Ellis's essays The New Spirit, a review by Henley's protégé Charles Whibley. In 1945, John Connell thought that Whibley ended his review with a 'sombre and disconcerting prophecy.' Today this prophecy is sombre, disconcerting, and bearing bitter fruit indeed.

The New Spirit is invading. Literature and art will soon be pegs upon which to hang moralities and nothing more. The Arts and Crafts will share with the New Journalism the sceptre of the world. Socialism and bleat will be gloriously triumphant. Humour and enjoyment of life will perish for lack of opportunity. We shall all write as 'scientifically' as Mr. Ellis writes, and perpetrate such monstrous phrases as 'sphygmographic tracings' and 'the brain still functioned brilliantly in the atrophied body'. We shall all be so lost to a sense of humour that we shall accept Swift's Strephon and Chloe (after the fashion of Mr. Ellis) as 'a certain emotional way of approaching the body'. And we shall be all equal and all stupid, and we shall drink nothing but the New Spirit.

Henley was a man who taught himself, attaining the summit of the literary Olympus by perseverance and by extraordinary hard work. Henley was crippled. Henley was constantly racked with pain. Henley was poor. Henley was beset by trials throughout his life. Yet Henley succeeded in literature and held his torments in check. He worked furiously hard. Henley's life was an odyssey.

Henley was midwife to the birth of many well-known writers of his day; Stevenson, JM Barry, and Rudyard Kipling to name three. Of Henley's writing, his verse is easiest to grasp especially when one knows the circumstances under which it was written. Best known of his verses are those produced while in hospital. Here is a selection:

• Enter Patient. Henley's first impression as he enters the Royal Infirmary at Edinburgh.
• Waiting. In the admissions room of a Victorian hospital.
• Interior. A sketch of the ward to which he is assigned.
• Before. Feeling before being taken to surgery.
• Operation. In and out of oblivion; a short death.
• After. Post operation.
• Vigil. Recovery begins.
• Staff-nurse: Old Style. A portrait.
• Lady-probationer. A portrait.
• Staff-nurse: New Style. A portrait.
• Clinical. A detached observation of himself the object of clinical examination by a leading surgeon in a teaching hospital.
• Invictus. In a lesser person this verse would be pretentious; hyperbole of the worst kind. By lesser is meant a person having no experience of similar vicissitudes of life.
• Interlude. Lighter moments.
• Discharged.