Kenneth Slessor's Importance

With all that matters of him occupying no more than two not very
bulky volumes — one of verse, called Poems, another of prose,
called Bread and Wine — Kenneth Slessor nevertheless continues to
be one of the really substantial Australian poets. Substantial and,
beyond that, promising even more: hinting towards greatness. He
lived his full three score and ten years and died five years ago, yet
somehow seemed still to be only on the verge of accomplishing what
was in him.
Slessor’s was a remarkable gift. Between Christopher Brennan, for
whom the claims made are usually too high but whose individuality
was unmistakable, and A. D. Hope, who was an international poet
from the beginning even though resolutely chauvinistic, Slessor’s is
the bridging talent. He raised all the problems about the relationship of the Australian poet to
European culture. He never found Hope’s solutions but on the other hand he did not succumb
to Brennan’s neuroses: he wrote to the limits set for him by an insoluble dilemma, and then
stopped. You cannot read his poems without pondering the might-have-beens. On the other
hand, what he did achieve is of permanent value.
Graham Burns’s little book Kenneth Slessor is a commendable introduction. Without
presuming to answer it, Mr. Burns knows the abiding question about Slessor: why does his
poetry so often suggest that the full force of his imagination has not been committed? It is
easy to go overboard about Slessor’s work, but finally it is more edifying to stay
disenchanted, since a full appreciation of his achievement depends on realizing that to some
extent it remained potential. Mr Burns is always ready to withhold astonishment, paying
Slessor the larger tribute of treating him as an artist who was rather beyond the lyric poems
he left us, even when those lyrics were masterpieces.
And masterpieces some of them are, even though generations of Australian
schoolboys—it was already happening while Slessor was alive, to his great
embarrassment — have been told to think so. Slessor’s language at its easy height
has an unforced richness, an understated but pervasive musicality, that must be any
young poet’s ideal. ‘Five Bells’, his most famous poem, has every kind of interest in
its ambitious design, but the first thing that always strikes any sensitive reader is the
confident originality of its local imagery, carried forward by a deceptively natural iambic
pulse — quite literally unforgettable.
You have no suburb, like those easier dead 
In private berths of dissolution laid— 
The tide goes over, the waves ride over you 
And let their shadows down like shining hair....
Ducking under the breakers and watching their shadows on the sand below, there must have
been scores of times in my student years when I recalled that last line. The first two lines
might have been written by Wilfred Owen or indeed any latter-day Georgian who had learnt
Owen’s lessons, but that last idea is Slessor’s very own, and seems to me even now to be
expressed in the uniquely Australian language which so many Australian poets sought, and
still seek, in vain.
‘Australianness’ has always been the philosopher’s stone, or poet’s stone, of Australian
culture. Every means has been tried in order to attain it. Incomprehensible vocabularies
composed of arcane references to flora, fauna and aboriginal folkways have burgeoned,
withered and died. The arbitrary symbolism of the apocalyptic 1940S in British poetry was a
miracle of tautness compared to its Australian equivalent, which had all that plus home-
grown totemism. The aim has always been to make a fresh start free from the dragging
weight of the European heritage.
Language is a continuity and in a continuity there can be no such thing as a fresh start, but for
a long time the fact could not be faced — the nationalistic urge was too powerful. As Mr.
Burns points out, Slessor managed to break free of this bind. His early poetry shows a certain
amount of European culture being absorbed, without any doomed attempts at transcendence.
Pretending in a dramatic monologue to be Heine, he sounds more like Browning, but even
more than that he begins to sound like himself.
All kinds of influences are detectable (Mr. Burns might have mentioned Flecker, whose
sickle moon surely provides the illumination on much of the early romanticism about the sea)
but the important thing is that when Slessor turned towards Australian subjects he was
already maturing beyond the self-destructive ambition to talk about them in a nationalist
language. At first he strained for effect, trying to achieve it as most gifted (and all giftless)
young poets do, by novelty of expression. But he soon grew out of that, to the point where his
originality of diction emerged naturally out of his originality of observation — the desirable
order of events, since if originality of diction is the first aim then originality of observation
tends not to happen, being usurped by mannerist posturings.
Slessor began as a King’s Cross bohemian who worshipped Norman Lindsay and ended as a
leader writer for The Daily Telegraph, a newspaper of stridently conservative views. It was
not a particularly distinguished intellectual record. He was never a scholar as Hope is a
scholar. All the more extraordinary, then, that he should have surmounted his early
pretensions, fighting his way free of them by creative instinct.
‘Five Bells’, ‘Captain Dobbin’ — most of Slessor’s finest poems are about Sydney Harbour.
Yet when we look into Bread and Wine we see that his prose on the same subject is at least as
wealthy in vision, and often more so. His dispatches from El Alamein—war correspondence
which far outstrips Hemingway’s in the evocation of battle — make his anthology-piece
poem about the war in the desert, ‘Beach Burial’, look a bit impoverished. The transfigurative
potentiality of Slessor’s poetry was never fully realized, perhaps because he was not notably
interested in society as such — he was a lyric poet by the circumscription of his personality.
But over and above that consideration there is the fact that his full resources as a writer were
for some reason held back from his poetry. When a poet’s prose manifests qualities that his
verse is starved of, we are entitled to suspect that he has not taken his final risks as an artist.
Why Slessor did not take those risks is still something of a mystery, which Mr. Burns’s
pamphlet does not pretend to clear up. Ultimately, I am convinced, Slessor’s diffidence had
something to do with the uncertainty of his role as an Australian poet — a role which he was
too intelligent to fulfil uncritically, but not intellectually formidable enough to transform. He
lived it as a problem, and was restricted by it. Nevertheless he left us a generous legacy,
which Mr. Burns is well qualified to discuss, although no educated man should ever use the
expression ‘life-style’ except in jest.
(TLS, 9 April 1976)
Taken from: http://www.clivejames.com/pieces/hercules/slessor