I think there are times when you have to work with what you've got. For me
Kenneth Slessor was the one earlier Australian poet who filled that role.
He's a strange character, deeply secretive, who operated among other
writers who probably had no idea of what he was up to. They were all anti-
modernists: people like Norman Lindsay whose visual art was full of
buccaneers and amply endowed naked women (all of them remarkably similar
because based on his wife). Slessor existed in this odd environment and his
early poems reflect this. But the later work moved right away, though he
always publically supported his confreres. He even his his Jewish
background from them (they were nearly all anti-Semites). His best known
poem, 'Five Bells' has a number of uncomfortable moments of Eliot pastiche
but, on the whole, with a number of other poems, stands alone amid the
murky Victoriana still largely practised in 1920s and 1930s Australia. He
stopped writing poems at the end of the war (1939-45) though he lived until
around 1970, a practising journalist and newspaper editor. Later in the
piece he would mischievously goad his allies. Douglas Stewart, his friend
and first biographer describes Slessor playing what he felt was 'a trick'
on him by putting on a recording of the Brecht/Weill Threepenny Opera.
Stewart just couldn't believe that Slessor actually liked this piece of
music.
I don't know what people from elsewhere would make of this poet. I mean at
least I've seen a deal of Kavanagh's work in anthologies. But all of this
means, thankfully, that we aren't the cardboard cutouts some of our critics
would like to believe we are.
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