Stumping about town on his one leg, a wooden crutch thrust under his strong right arm, Henley became a notable fixture on the London literary scene, forever popping up like some jack-in-the-box, as editor of one publication or another, or penning an unforgettable ode. Out of that dreadful sequester at the infirmary, where the complications of tuberculosis had claimed his leg, he wrote the poem ‘Invictus’, a cri de coeur whose last stanza has become the rallying cry of all who must face impossible odds: ‘It matters not how strait the gate, How charged with punishments the scroll, I am the
...more
