Selected Poems of James Henry

Ricks, Christopher (editor)

ISBN 10: 1590510216 / ISBN 13: 9781590510216

Published by Handsel Books, 2002

About this Item

Stiff unmarked book in crisp dust jacket with faint darkening to front panel. ; 5.75 X 1 X 8.75 inches; 180 pages.

Seller Inventory # 63392

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Selected Poems of James Henry
• Publisher: Handsel Books
• Publication Date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1590510216
• ISBN 13: 9781590510216
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: First Edition; First Printing.
• Condition: Fine
• Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good+
• Seller catalogs:
  • Poetry

About this title

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 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.