Resource

Kenneth Slessor For His Singular Australian Poems

 
Grade: HSC
Subject: English Standard
Resource type: Notes
Written by: N/A
Year uploaded: 2021
Page length: 3
 

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Resource Description

Kenneth Slessor for his singular Australian poems. 

He depicted the Australian landscape without the sentimentality of popular bush poets such as Banjo Patterson.

“And over the flat earth of empty farms/ The monstrous continent of air floats back/ Coloured with rooting sunlight and the black,/ Bruised flesh of thunderstorms” South Country (1993), p112.

His image “Bruised flesh of thunderstorms” is evidence of masterly metaphoric compression.

It captured the difficulty European minds had with embracing a brutal environment, while it invited readers to feel nature’s vulnerability.

North Country continued the theme of nature’s vulnerability, but this time the threat came from the hands of man.

North Country, filled with gesturing wood,” . . . “Or trunks of pewter, bangled by greedy death,” (p111).

“Bangled” referred to the practice of ring barking trees to strangle them to death, so that the land could be cleared for agriculture. “Greedy death” evoked the attitude of the poet to this practice.

Therefore it can be argued that Slessor demonstrated an environmental concern decades before it was fashionable.

Slessor’s distinctive poetic vision can be partly attributed to his European heritage.

He was the second son of Robert Schloesser, who was German and Jewish in origin and changed his name to the more anglo-saxon Slessor in 1914 to avoid internment in Australia.

The Schloessers encouraged classical music, French, love of fine food and European culture.

Their influence is clearly apparent in the regular rhymes and subject matter of poems such as Nuremberg.

“And, oh, those thousand towers of Nuremberg/ Flowering like leaden trees outside the panes:/Those gabled roofs with smoking cowls, and those/ Encrusted spires of stone, those golden vanes/ On shining housetops paved with scarlet tiles!” (p3).

He was also inspired by early 20th century “modernist” thinking and explicitly confronted readers’ understanding of beauty in some of his city poems.

William Street refers to a major Sydney thoroughfare.

The poem paints a busy, wet cityscape, with unromantic images of drunks, prostitutes


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