Selected Poems of James Henry - Hardcover

James Henry

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1590510216 ISBN 13: 9781590510216

Publisher: Handsel Books, 2002

Synopsis

James Henry (1798-1876) was a controversially humane doctor in Dublin, elected Vice President of the College of Physicians in 1832. Thirteen years later, receiving a large legacy on the death of his mother, he gave up the practice of medicine to begin more than twenty years of journeying through Europe on foot, with his wife and daughter, studying Virgilian manuscripts and rare editions, translating The Aeneid, and writing poems.

More than a century after Henry's death, Christopher Ricks came upon a book of his poems -- printed at his own expense and with their pages still uncut -- in the Cambridge University Library. Here was poetry, Ricks writes in his introduction to this volume, "unaffectedly direct, sinewy, seriously comic. And "brave" from a man who "had integrity, moral, political, and spiritual." His convictions and his humor, his idiosyncrasies and his courage, were realized by him in poems of gravity and levity that gained no attention in his day, but are worthy of our time.

"What a find Ricks has here! Such a pleasant personality, even when contemplating the backward and forward abysm in which we all find ourselves. That poem of a man with the cigar, woman with a basket - how profound, how amusing, how accurate, how sad. Hoorah for Henry."
-Charles Tomlinson

"Henry is special. There’s no one like him."
-Philip Levine

About this title

About the Author

Christopher Ricks is a Professor of the Humanities as Boston University, having previously taught at Oxford and Cambridge. He has published books on Milton, Tennyson, Keats, T.S. Eliot, and Beckett, as well as two collections of critical essays.

Reviews

Good poets are usually known in their lifetimes. The religious poets Thomas Traherne (1638-74) and Edward Taylor (1642-1729), discovered in the twentieth century, are rare exceptions to that rule, as is editor Ricks' invaluable find, James Henry (1798-1876). Unlike Traherne and Taylor, Henry assailed the God and the morality of the Bible. A physician turned classicist, thanks to an inheritance, he pursued the study of Virgil on foot throughout Europe until he was 70. Anglo-Irish, he championed Ireland against England. A radical, he was nonetheless skeptical of his era's progress. He favored unrhymed trochaic tetrameters (the line of Longfellow's Song of Hiawatha), varied by spondees and iambs. When seriously fulminating, he sounds like a cranky Quaker (see "Progress"); when bearding religion, like a better-educated Ambrose Bierce; when questioning life's meaning, like a proto-Samuel Beckett. He is frequently funny, especially in the only prose here, a dialogue between a doctor and an unborn child that stops just short of recommending abortion. He would be at home on today's op-ed pages. Ray Olson
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Edition details

• Publisher: Handsel Books
• Publication date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1590510216
• ISBN 13: 9781590510216
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 180
• Editor: Christopher Ricks