In this series, we explore influential Australian poems.

There are giants of Australian literature who are household names, and those who once were but are no longer. Francis Webb (1925–73) fits firmly in the latter category. His works are rarely quoted in public life, inscribed on public art or taught in schools.

Webb’s case tells us much about the shifting character and nature of Australian literature, for he has never been completely forgotten either. His reputation endures in a strange space where a writer regarded by the cream of his generation and generations since as an unmatched “poet’s poet” can also be simultaneously unknown to most readers today.

Webb would hardly have minded. He saw right through fame from the start. It is no accident that the colonial villains he dramatises in early poems, such as A Drum for Ben Boyd (1948) and Morgan’s Country (1952), are vainglorious, corrupt and self-serving. To a Poet (1943), written when Webb was 18, derides the revered poets of his own era thus:

Now yours is the grand power, great for good or evil: The schoolboy (poor devil!) will be told off to study you. On hills over the sky you have set your plinths of stone. You have crushed yourself, alone, in unscented, unstarred valleys.

Now yours is the grand power, great for good or evil: The schoolboy (poor devil!) will be told off to study you. On hills over the sky you have set your plinths of stone. You have crushed yourself, alone, in unscented, unstarred valleys.

In Cap and Bells (1943–45), he dedicates himself to the role of holy fool, in keeping with his namesake St Francis of Assisi, who was known as the “fool of God”. Webb ends this early poem silently declaring to himself, on a crowded train on the Harbour Bridge,

I have chosen the little, obscure way In the dim shouting vortex; I have taken A fool’s power in his cap and bells.

I have chosen the little, obscure way In the dim shouting vortex; I have taken A fool’s power in his cap and bells.

As the poem makes clear, fools are not only servants of a higher truth; they are truth-tellers who can laugh in the face of kings, just as much as in the face of death or war or modernity.

Webb grew up in North Sydney during the 1930s. He was only 14 when World War II broke out. Around this time, he developed a fascination with poetry. One of his teachers at St Pius X College in Chatswood recalled his burning desire to be published in the most widely-read literary forum of the era, the “Red Page” of the Bulletin.

As the war raged, Webb finished high school at Christian Brothers High School in Lewisham, coming second in the state for English in the NSW Leaving Certificate. He could have enrolled at Sydney University, but instead chose the army, then the air force. He trained as a RAAF wireless air gunner in Canada, but never saw active service. During this time, he became briefly engaged to a Canadian woman in Winnipeg, his only recorded relationship, later recalled in For Ethel (1952).

Webb wanted his work to be known, but not the expectations that came with it. In the few short years after Palace of Dreams (1942) first appeared in the Bulletin, Webb became essential reading for acolytes of the Red Page. He was praised to the skies by its influential editor Douglas Stewart, anthologised by Kenneth Slessor in Australian Poetry 1945 and had his debut collection A Drum for Ben Boyd (1948) illustrated by Norman Lindsay.

The latter was published in hardback by the formidable Angus and Robertson and turned Webb into a prize-winning poet, taking out the 1948 Grace Leven Award.

Any serious poet of Webb’s age would have given their right arm for such a meteoric rise and lofty praise. Yet Webb ran from it. In 1947, he returned to live in Canada, concerned that “too much praise, a bit stultifying, had been accorded me […] I yearned for full freedom and solitude”.

While working as a farmhand and manuscript editor in Toronto, he wrote most of his second collection, Leichhardt in Theatre (1952). Reviewers of the era were taken with the title sequence about the 1848 disappearance of Prussian explorer Ludwig Leichhardt. All ignored a smaller piece called On First Hearing a Cuckoo, set in an........

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