William Ernest Henley Biography Quotes 3 Report mistakes

Early Life and Education
William Ernest Henley was born in Gloucester, England, on 23 August 1849, the son of a bookseller and stationer. He attended the Crypt School in Gloucester, where an appetite for literature and a command of strong, sinewy language began to show. From adolescence he suffered from tubercular disease of the bone, a condition that shadowed his life and shaped both his temperament and his art. Though he did not take a university degree, his reading was wide, and from his teen years he aimed himself toward letters, supporting himself in journalism and the book trade.

Illness, Amputation, and the Influence of Joseph Lister
Henley's illness led to the amputation of his left leg below the knee when he was about twenty. A few years later his right foot was threatened by the same disease. He went to Edinburgh and came under the care of the pioneering surgeon Joseph Lister, whose antiseptic methods were revolutionizing surgery. Lister saved the limb, and the months Henley spent in the Royal Infirmary gave him not only health but a subject. From this ordeal came the hospital poems that first made his name, the clear-eyed realism and unflinching courage of a patient who refused self-pity. During this period he wrote the lines later titled Invictus, a compact creed of endurance that culminates in the famous close, "I am the master of my fate; I am the captain of my soul". The poem appeared without a title in his A Book of Verses (1888); the name Invictus was supplied later by Arthur Quiller-Couch when he included it in The Oxford Book of English Verse.

Poet of Grit and City Life
Henley's poetry stood apart from the languor and ornament of much late-Victorian verse. He favored strong cadence, colloquial emphasis, and subjects drawn from hospitals, streets, and docks. The sequences In Hospital and London Voluntaries made his reputation as a poet of modern life, brisk in rhythm and unsentimental in observation. Other collections, including Hawthorn and Lavender, showed a lyric gift capable of tenderness and reflective poise, yet his defining note remained a strenuous, embattled humanity.

Editor and Critic
Alongside poetry, Henley built an influential career as a critic and editor. He edited The Magazine of Art from 1881 to 1886, writing vigorous criticism that helped introduce British readers to contemporary tendencies in painting and sculpture and pressed the claims of artists such as Auguste Rodin. In 1889 he helped launch the Scots Observer in Edinburgh; the paper soon moved to London and became the National Observer. Under his exacting and combative editorship in the early 1890s, the journal gained a reputation for muscular prose and high standards. He encouraged younger writers, notably Rudyard Kipling, whose ballads and tales found early champions in Henley's pages, and he welcomed work by established figures including Thomas Hardy. His essays, gathered in Views and Reviews (1890), displayed forthright judgments, a distrust of cant, and a flair for memorable phrasing. He also turned to scholarship, co-editing a major edition of Robert Burns's poetry with Thomas F. Henderson in the 1890s, a labor that combined close textual work with a feel for living speech.

Friendships, Collaborations, and Literary Circles
In Edinburgh Henley formed a durable friendship with Robert Louis Stevenson. The two collaborated on plays, among them Deacon Brodie, Beau Austin, Admiral Guinea, and Macaire, stage pieces that married Stevenson's narrative deftness to Henley's theatrical sense. Stevenson, in turn, drew on Henley's presence for the character of Long John Silver in Treasure Island, noting his friend's indomitable will and swaggering resourcefulness, transformed into the pirate's rough vitality. Henley's circle in London journalism brought him into contact with a wide range of authors and artists; he debated and sometimes clashed with aesthetes and symbolists while maintaining a practical loyalty to craft and clarity.

Family and Personal Trials
Henley married Anna, known as Annie, and their home became a place of conversation, hospitality, and literary talk. Their daughter, Margaret, born in 1888, was the center of his affections. The child's early death in 1894 was a blow from which neither parent fully recovered. During her brief life she charmed family friends, among them J. M. Barrie. Margaret's affectionate mispronunciation "fwendy", for "friend", helped inspire Barrie's coinage "Wendy", later immortalized in Peter Pan. The connection marks an unexpected bridge between Henley's household and one of the emblematic myths of the Edwardian stage. Though Henley and Barrie later grew apart, the link through Margaret is indelible.

Later Work and Final Years
Through the 1890s Henley continued to write poetry, to review with uncompromising candor, and to edit with a demanding eye. His health, always precarious, required periods of rest, but his output remained steady. He gathered and revised his verse, corresponded widely, and sustained a public presence as an advocate of vigor in English letters. The stoic posture of Invictus was not a pose for the page: he lived it daily, walking on a wooden leg, leaning on a stick, yet refusing to surrender energy or curiosity. He died on 11 July 1903 at Woking, Surrey, after complications related to his long-standing illness.

Legacy
Henley's reputation has been shaped by two intertwined facts: he was a poet of distinctive cadence and a maker of other writers' fortunes. As editor he helped set the tone of fin-de-siecle journalism, backing bracing styles and the robust narratives of Rudyard Kipling at a crucial moment. As collaborator and friend of Robert Louis Stevenson he contributed to the late-Victorian stage and, indirectly, to one of fiction's great characters. As father to Margaret he stands, unexpectedly, at the origins of Barrie's Wendy. Above all, as the author of the lines later named Invictus, he gave English a compact gospel of resolve that crossed borders of class, creed, and nation. The life that produced that poem, tested by disease, sharpened by work, enlarged by friendship and grief, remains the essential gloss on his verse: an example of a writer who made adversity a theme, a discipline, and a style.

Our collection contains 3 quotes who is written by William, under the main topics: Free Will & Fate - Resilience.