Henderson's poem series, ‘Freedom Becomes People’, was published in 1985 with a brief passage explaining ‘the idea of the poem’. This ‘idea’, dated 1968, set out the themes of an extended sequence of ‘art-poetry’ that was to be the first Henderson had published since his Elegies for the Dead in Cyrenaica (1948). It begins with a quotation from Heinrich Heine: ‘Freedom, which has hitherto only become man here and there, must pass into the mass itself, into the lowest strata of society, and become people’. Henderson insists that what Heine says of freedom applies also to poetry: that it has the potential to become everyone, and indeed, that it has, like freedom, a moral imperative to become everyone. The simple present form – ‘becomes’ – invokes the sense in which both liberties and lyrical self-expression must be continually sought out and reaffirmed; this is a universal, timeless truth. To ensure that this democratisation of poetry is realised is, writes Henderson, ‘our most urgent task’. This ideal is articulated as an enterprise for the collective, and as an aspiration not only of Henderson's creative work but one that ought to be pursued by any poetry worthy of the name.

The ‘idea of the poem’ is not simply an exposition of Henderson's views on the responsibilities of the creative artist in contemporary society; it is a heuristic device offered to the magazine's readers. Henderson's ideas about how the ‘isolation’ of the artist in modern society might be overcome provide a distillation of his cultural politics and a blueprint for their suggested aesthetic forms. The purpose of this chapter is to explore some of the early manifestations of this search for a poetry that ‘becomes people’. Henderson's most productive period, in terms of poetic output, coincided with his military service and with the remaining post-war years of the 1940s. Indeed, Henderson's experiences of war constituted a vital formative influence on his political values and on the cultural forms through which they were to be conceived and pursued.