A Study Guide for William Ernest Henley's "Invictus"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for William Ernest Henley's "Invictus," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Sep 28, 2016
• ISBN: 9781535826150

Book preview

13

Invictus

William Ernest Henley

1875

Introduction

The critic John Ciardi has called William Ernest Henley's 1875 Invictus the most famous bad poem in English. Ciardi disliked the poem not because it imagines the world as a cosmic prison house, but because he thinks Henley is ridiculously boastful for imagining he can resist its oppression. However, it is nevertheless true that everyone is called upon by circumstance, at some time or other, to bear up under what Shakespeare called The Slings and Arrows of outrageous Fortune, and the Sea of troubles which arise from the thousand Natural shocks / that Flesh is heir to (Hamlet, act 3, scene 1). Hamlet longed to succumb to misfortune because the effort to resist it is a heavy burden. Therefore, it is not surprising that Henley must use a bit of bravado to summon up the inner strength simply to go on. Henley wrote Invictus when he was twenty-five years old, after losing one foot to disease at age sixteen, and still in a hospital with doctors telling him that his remaining foot had to be amputated to save his life. While Henley's poem cycle In Hospital gives a dispassionate, sanitized account of his experience, Invictus is a meditation on the inner process that allowed him to go on. The poem can be found in Henley's A Book of Verses and in such anthologies as The New Oxford Book of English Verse (1972).

Author Biography

Henley was born on August 23, 1849, in Gloucester, England. His father was a bookseller, a figure on the margin of the middle class. He sent his son William to the Crypt Grammar School. Henley never formally graduated, probably as much because of his father's inability to pay