"Unbought and unbossed" & "Bloodied but unbowed"

[Jesse Sheidlower]

On Wed, Jan 25, 2006 at 07:11:05PM -0500, Fred Shapiro wrote:
> On Wed, 25 Jan 2006, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
>
> >"My head is bloodied, but unbowed," wrote poet/journalist/slangman
> >William Ernest Henley (1849-1903) in "Invictus."
>
> Was Henley really a slangman, or was he on the title page to give
> respectability to Farmer?

He did the work. See, most recently, Damian Atkinson, _The
Correspondence of John Stephen Farmer and W. E. Henley on
Their Slang Dictionary, 1890-1904_ (Lewiston, NY: EdWin
Mellen, 2003).

Jesse Sheidlower
OED

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