Despite his relatively small oeuvre, Kenneth Slessor is one of the most celebrated of Australian poets. Until the posthumous publication of Collected Poems in 1994, Slessor's reputation rested upon the 103 poems that constitute the much reprinted Selected Poems (1975), of which 100 were written by 1939. Sometimes credited with introducing modernism into Australian verse, Slessor continues to be lauded by both experimentalists and traditionalists alike. If Slessor may be said to have a relationship to modernism, it is through the temper of his work rather than its form, for his formal experimentation did not extend far, and certainly Slessor was no believer in aesthetic revolution.

Slessor was born Kenneth Adolphe Schloesser on 27 March 1901 in the small country town of Orange in New South Wales. His father, Robert, was a mining engineer who was born in London, educated in Europe, and immigrated to Australia in 1888. Robert Schloesser met and married Margaret McInnes, the...