Search results
William Ernest Henley (23 August 1849 – 11 July 1903) was an English poet, writer, critic and editor. Though he wrote several books of poetry, Henley is remembered most often for his 1875 poem "Invictus". A fixture in London literary circles, the one-legged Henley was an inspiration for Robert Louis Stevenson 's character Long John Silver ...
Aug 19, 2024 · William Ernest Henley was a British poet, critic, and editor who in his journals introduced the early work of many of the great English writers of the 1890s. Son of a Gloucester bookseller and a pupil of the poet T.E. Brown, Henley contracted a tubercular disease that later necessitated the
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
Born in Gloucester, England, poet, editor, and critic William Ernest Henley was educated at Crypt Grammar School, where he studied with the poet T.E. Brown, and the University of St. Andrews. His father was a struggling bookseller who died when Henley was a teenager.
- Early Life
- Illness
- Poet and Playwright
- Political Views
- Editor
- Critic
- Death and Legacy
- References and Further Reading
William Ernest Henley (1849-1903), an influential editor, critic and poet, had a role in the late-Victorian period similar to that of Dr Samuel Johnson in the late eighteenth century. He was born in Gloucester as the eldest of a family of six (five sons and a daughter). His father, WilliamHenley (1826-1868), a bookseller and stationer, died in pove...
W. E. Henleyby Auguste Rodin. [Click on thumbnail for larger image.] As early as at the age of 12 Henley was diagnosed with tuberculosis of the bone, which led to the amputation of his left leg below the knee a few years later. In 1873, his other leg was also affected by tuberculosis, but thanks to the innovative treatment of Dr Joseph Lister, who ...
Henley published several books of poetry, but he is best remembered for the poem “Invictus” (1875), which reflects his resilient struggle with the deadly disease. Henley wrote more poems about his hospital experiences, but their stark realism was too difficult to accept by many Victorian readers.Paradoxically, as his biographer Jerome Hamilton Buck...
Although, as Buckley wrote, art and not politics was Henley’s main preoccupation (128), he held conservative and imperial political views. He was critical about Gladstone’s arguments for Irish Home Rule. Yeats, an Irish nationalist, not surprisingly described him as a “violent unionist and imperialist” (Buckley, 129). Henley gave vent to his conser...
William Henley had an exceptional editorial talent. He edited four different magazines in various periods of his life. In 1877, Henley became the editor of the short-lived magazine London, founded by George Glasgow Brown, a friend of his and of Stevenson. Henley published in it three parts of Stevenson’s earliest essays, Virginibus Puerisque, and T...
As a critic, Henley contributed not only to journals he edited but also to the Athenaeum, the Saturday Review, Vanity Fair, St. James Gazette and the Pall Mall Gazette. In1890, Henley published a book of criticism, Views and Reviews. Essays in Appreciation, which contains his reflections about popular writers and artists of the past and present. As...
In 1902, Henley fell from a railway carriage. This accident caused the latent tuberculosis germ to awaken in his organism. He died on 11 July 1903, at the age of 53 and was buried next to his daughter’s grave in the churchyard in Cockayne Hatley, a small village in Bedfordshire. His wife was later buried at the same churchyard. As the editor of sev...
Buckley, Jerome Hamilton. William Ernest Henley: A Study in the Counter- Decadence of the Nineties. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1945. Cohen, Edward H. The Henley-Stevenson Quarrel. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1974. Connell, John. W. E. Henley. London: Constable, 1949. Davidson, Donald. British Poetry of the Eighteen-Ninetie...
Portrait of William Ernest Henley by Leslie Ward, published in Vanity Fair, 26 November 1892. " Invictus " is a short poem by the Victorian era British poet William Ernest Henley (1849–1903). Henley wrote it in 1875, and in 1888 he published it in his first volume of poems, Book of Verses, in the section titled "Life and Death (Echoes)".
William Ernest Henley, born August 23, 1849, was an influential British poet, perhaps best known for his poem “Invictus” (1875). He is the author of A Song of Speed (D. Nutt, 1903), Hawthorn & Lavender with Other Verses (D. Nutt, 1901), and For England’s Sake: Verses and Songs in Time of War (D. Nutt, 1900), among others.
People also ask
When did William Ernest Henley die?
Where did William Ernest Henley go to school?
When did William Ernest Henley write Invictus?
How many children did William Henley have?
How many magazines did William Henley edit?
What does Henley's hospital poem have in common with Eliot of the Waste Land?
William Ernest Henley - William Ernest Henley, born August 23, 1849, was an influential British poet, perhaps best known for his poem “Invictus” (1875). He is the author of A Song of Speed (D. Nutt, 1903), Hawthorn & Lavender with Other Verses (D. Nutt, 1901), and For England’s Sake: Verses and Songs in Time of War (D. Nutt, 1900), among others.
