POETRY: A few years ago, Poetry Ireland Review ran a feature inviting writers to nominate Ireland's most neglected poet. Logically, the accolade should have gone to the poet chosen by the fewest contributors, though James Henry went one step further and failed to get mentioned at all. James who? Even his name is confusing, making him look like a misprint for Henry James. The person we have to thank for his rediscovery is Christopher Ricks.
Before Ricks's intervention, Henry's self-published works had sunk without trace. There were copies in Cambridge University Library, but when Ricks tried to read them he found the pages were still uncut. Ricks has helped Henry into print before, in the New Oxford Book of Victorian Verse and Oxford Book of English Verse, but this Selected Poems is the first modern edition of Henry's work.
James Henry was born in Dublin in 1798 and trained as a surgeon. Announcing that no doctor's opinion was worth a guinea, he scandalised his contemporaries by only charging five shillings a consultation. Among his prose works is the magnificently titled A Letter to the Members of the Temperance Society, showing that the use of tea and coffee cannot be safely substituted for that of spirituous liquors, and proposing a diet from which those substances are excluded, published in 1830. In 1846 he came into an inheritance and abandoned medicine to travel Europe on foot with his wife and daughter in search of Virgilian manuscripts and rare editions.
When his wife died in Arco, near Lake Garda, in 1849, Henry was refused permission for a churchyard burial, so instead had her cremated and carried the ashes with him for the further 20 years of his scholarly odyssey (or should that be Aeneid) before he returned to Ireland. He died in Dalkey in 1876.
Henry was a fearless freethinker. His rejection of Christianity as a religion of sadism and torture-worship was daring and absolute. He rails against the concept of sin, prayer, the soul and the afterlife with a mixture of patient reasonableness and indignant fury. A soul entering heaven asks to be reunited with his mother and is told that she is:
down, down, down at the other side of the Earth,
Down in the depths of Hell, for ever there
Condemned by the unchangeable decree
Of the Allmerciful, to writhe in torment.
Bible stories are sardonically retold, the Church reminded of its fondness for burning heretics, and God's delight in pain indicted with all the fervour of Beckett's howl of atheist outrage, 'Ooftish'. Elsewhere, he anticipates the humane scepticism of Hubert Butler in the 'Dialogue between a Stethoscopist and an Unborn Child', which would have made a timely pamphlet before the last abortion referendum. The Victorian writer with whom he has most in common is another scourge of humbug, Arthur Hugh Clough, not just for his religious themes but for his travel writing. Clough had his Amours de Voyage and Henry has his Thalia Petasata, or A Foot-Journey from Carlsruhe to Bassano. Clough rewrites the 10 commandments in 'The Latest Decalogue', and Henry expounds Victorian self-interest with an innocence worthy of Isaac Watts in 'Man's Universal Hymn':
The Lord's my God and still shall be,
For a kind God he is to me,
And gives me a carte-blanche to rob
His other creatures, and to fob
For my own use their property,
So good and kind he is to me.
Among the most enjoyable of Henry's poems are quirky, characterful pieces like 'Blessed be the man who invented chairs', 'Out of the Frying Pan into the Fire', the diptych of 'Old Man' and 'Very Old Man', and 'By What Mistake were Pigeons Made so Happy', which begins:
By what mistake were pigeons made so happy,
So plump and fat and sleek and well content,
So little with affairs of others meddling,
So little meddled with?
After being 'so little meddled with' for so many years, James Henry's time has finally come. We should all be as happy as pigeons, and no mistake.
• David Wheatley is a poet and critic
Selected Poems of James Henry. Edited by Christopher Ricks.The Lilliput Press, 180pp. €19.99