Kenneth Slessor

Australian poet and journalist Kenneth Slessor was born in Orange, a city in east-central New South Wales, Australia. He wrote articles for the Sydney Sun starting at age 19, and he began publishing his poetry in the 1920s in Vision. His antimodernist, anti-intellectual early poems, collected in Earth-Visitors (1926), illustrate a stylistic movement from Australian bush poetry to a Nietzschean unrestrained joy in beauty and life.

In his later works, Canberra (1966) and Life at the Cross (1965), Slessor applied technical innovations to Australian themes. He utilized unconventional rhyme, lyrical experiments, rich imagery, and dramatic techniques. His poetry vented verbal energy mollified by the use of irony. Though melancholy and disillusion were characteristic of Slessor’s poetry, individualism and a zest for life were also prominent features. His favorite themes included time, the sea, and reflections on memory; his message was one of romantic renunciation.

Among Slessor’s most well-known poems are “Beach Burial,” written for Australian World War II troops, and “Five Bells,” which responds to the death of his friend Joe Lynch, who drowned in Sydney Harbor.

Slessor died in Sydney, Australia, on July 30, 1971.