HENDERSON, Hamish

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Nationality: Scottish. Born: Blairgowrie, Perthshire, 11 November 1919. Education: Blairgowrie High School; Dulwich College, London; Downing College, Cambridge, M.A. Military Service: High-land Division during World War II. Family: Married; two daughters. Career: Senior lecturer and research fellow, 1951–87, and since 1987 honorary fellow, School of Scottish Studies, University of Edinburgh. Awards: Somerset Maugham award, 1949. LL.D.: University of Dundee. Honorary degrees: University of Dundee, Open University, University of Edinburgh. Address: School of Scottish Studies, 27 George Square, Edinburgh EH8 9LD, Scotland.

Publications

Poetry

Elegies for the Dead in Cyrenaica. London, Lehmann, 1948.

Freedom Come-All-Ye, in Chapbook special issue (Aberdeen), vol. 3 no. 6, 1967.

Other

Alias MacAlias. Edinburgh, Polygon, 1990.

The Armstrong Nose: Selected Letters of Hamish Henderson. Edinburgh, Polygon, 1996.

Editor, and contributor, Ballads of World War II, Collected by Seumas Mor Maceanruig. Glasgow, Caledonian Press, 1947.

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Critical Studies: The Poet Speaks edited by Peter Orr, London, Routledge, and New York, Barnes and Noble, 1966; "The Elegies of Rilke and Henderson: Influence and Variation" by Richard E. Ziegfeld, in Studies in Scottish Literature (Columbia, South Carolina), 16, 1981; "The Sea, the Desert, the City: Environment and Language in W.S. Graham, Hamish Henderson, and Tom Leonard" by Edwin Morgan, in Yearbook of English Studies (London), 17, 1987; Hamish Henderson issue of Tocher, 43, 1991.

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Hamish Henderson's first book of verse, Elegies for the Dead in Cyrenaica, was published in 1948 and was the product of the desert fighting that inspired so much of the best English poetry of World War II, including that of Keith Douglas. Appearing when it did, it tended to miss the tide of interest in war poetry that had been nourished by the conflict itself. The fact that the author has produced little poetry since has also not aided his reputation. Yet Henderson has always had a small band of admirers, and rereading his elegies it is easy to see why.

The book has two advantages: it can be read complete, as a whole, not just as a collection of poems written in different moods and on different occasions; and it has a comfortable relationship to the modernist tradition, something more likely to happen with Scottish poets than with English ones. Henderson was obviously much influenced by the Eliot of The Four Quartets, but at that period it was difficult not to be if one had not succumbed to the influences of Dylan Thomas or Edith Sitwell. But one also hears within his work the voices of Europe: Goethe and Hölderlin, who supply him with epigraphs, and the Alexandrian Greek Cavafy, whom he quotes. The poems are successful philosopical verse, a comparatively rare thing in twentieth-century English poetry.

Henderson combines his philosophical bent with a delicate naturalism and a skillful control of tone, which means that the poems, which are comparatively long, can rise up into the high style and leave it again without difficulty, just as the author requires. Here is an example from the beginning of the second elegy:

   At dawn, under the concise razor-edge
   of the escarpment, the laager sleeps. No petrol fires yet,
   blow flame for brew-up. Up on the pass a sentry
   inhales his Nazionale. Horse-shoe-curve of the bay
   grows visible beneath him. He smokes and yawns.
   Ooo-augh,
    and the limitless
   shabby lion-pelt of the desert completes and rounds
   his limitless ennui.

One suspects that this is the kind of wartime verse most likely to last and be read by posterity.

—Edward Lucie-Smith