Christopher Wallace-Crabbe was born in the inner Melbourne suburb of Richmond on 6 May 1934. His father was a journalist and his mother a pianist. He attended Scotch College and then the University of Melbourne, graduating with a BA in 1956 and an MA in 1964. Wallace-Crabbe became Melbourne University's Lockie Fellow in Australian Literature and Creative Writing from 1961 to 1963. Over the next decades he became Reader in English before being promoted to a Personal Chair in 1988. He was Harkness Fellow at Yale University 1965-7, Professor of Australian Studies at Harvard, 1987-8, and visiting Professor at the University of Venice, 1973 and 2005. In 1984 he was elected Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. He was also founding director of the Australian Centre at the University of Melbourne, serving from 1989 until 1994, and returning as Professor Emeritus in 1998. In 2011 he was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia.
Wallace-Crabbe began publishing poetry while still an undergraduate, with his first book, No Glass Houses, appearing in 1955. He has gone on to publish many volumes, attracting a number of prizes, including the Grace Leven Poetry Prize in 1985 for The Amorous Cannibal, the Dublin Prize for the Arts and Sciences in 1987 and the Philip Hodgins Memorial Medal in 2002. His Selected Poems: 1956-1994 won both the Dinny O'Hearn Poetry Prize and the Book of the Year Award in the 1995 Age Book of the Year Awards. Frequently set in Melbourne and generally urbane in tone, his poems range widely in theme and subject, from the political to the personal. Wallace-Crabbe has also edited many anthologies and collections of essays and published a number of collections of his literary criticism and essays. In 1981 he also published a novel, Splinters.
Wallace-Crabbe began publishing poetry while still an undergraduate, with his first book, No Glass Houses, appearing in 1955. He has gone on to publish many volumes, attracting a number of prizes, including the Grace Leven Poetry Prize in 1985 for The Amorous Cannibal, the Dublin Prize for the Arts and Sciences in 1987 and the Philip Hodgins Memorial Medal in 2002. His Selected Poems: 1956-1994 won both the Dinny O'Hearn Poetry Prize and the Book of the Year Award in the 1995 Age Book of the Year Awards. Frequently set in Melbourne and generally urbane in tone, his poems range widely in theme and subject, from the political to the personal. Wallace-Crabbe has also edited many anthologies and collections of essays and published a number of collections of his literary criticism and essays. In 1981 he also published a novel, Splinters.
Useful links
- Review: Geoff Page Reviews Chris Wallace-Crabbe - Cordite Poetry Review
Now a youthful 79, the Melbourne poet, Chris Wallace-Crabbe, has been an important figure in Australian poetry since the early 1960s. As a teacher, scholar, anthologist and organizer – as well as a poet with at least fourteen volumes to his name – Wallace-Crabbe has been central to much that has happened in Australian poetry over the past fifty years, especially in Melbourne. As with his friend, the late Peter Porter, Wallace-Crabbe’s lightly-worn erudition and distinctive sense of humour have ensured that his work is admired by many poets (and readers) across the aesthetic divisions in our poetry reaching back to the 1970s. Varied though it may be, one would have to be a determined curmudgeon not to like his work. - Biography: Chris Wallace-Crabbe - The Poetry Library
A biography of Chris Wallace-Crabbe, as well as links to a large number of his poems. - Profile: Chris Wallace-Crabbe - The Sydney Morning Herald
He's not a singer but he'll pen a sonnet for sixpence and a pocketful of wry. - Review: Headlong into poetic life of Chris Wallace-Crabbe - The Australian
'But the merest bud or apple core, / A cairngorm or a mouse's paw / Can be your grist." Written for Peter Steele, these lines from one of the new poems in Chris Wallace-Crabbe's New and Selected Poems provide part-summation of the writer's process as well as that of his friend and fellow poet, who died almost 12 months ago. - Review: Cassandra Atherton reviews New and Selected Poems by Chris Wallace-Crabbe - Mascara Literary Review
On the eve of his eightieth birthday, it seems appropriate that Chris Wallace-Crabbe’s New and Selected Poems offers readers an insight into his rich oeuvre and the opportunity to remedy, at least on a small scale, what Michael Sharkey (2007) has argued is the ‘few [who have] systematically read his works….from the first publications through to the most recent’. - Interview: In Dialogue with Chris Wallace-Crabbe - Double Dialogues
Christopher Keith Wallace-Crabbe was born in Melbourne in 1934 and is a Professor of English at Melbourne University including the directorship of the Australian Centre there between 1989 and 1994. Apart from editing numerous anthologies, he is the author since the late ‘fifties of thirteen collections of poetry, one novel, and four critical works, including Falling into Language (1990). Since 1985, his poetry has been published by Oxford University Press, making him one of the few Australian poets with an international reputation. His latest collection of poetry is By and Large (2001).This exchange took place in Melbourne during January and February 1996. - Interview: A sharp eye brings its own reward - The Age
Chris Wallace-Crabbe won his first prize when he was five. He still has the book he received. ''It says it was literature. Quite what they meant by that I really don't know.'' - Interview: Poet Chris Wallace-Crabbe speaks about a storied career and the literary landscape - The Examiner
Legendary poet Chris Wallace-Crabbe has a well-honed connection with Tasmania. - Starting from Melbourne: The Coherence of Chris Wallace-Crabbe - by Michael Sharkey
Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature, 2007, Vol. 6, pp. 103-118
Abstract: The article traces the trajectory I observe in Wallace-Crabbe’s writing since his first poetry publication. The focus is on his consciousness of the paradox of language’s ability to express what Auden called “unmentionable private concerns”—and, I would add, “unmentionable” aspects of public life. The essay necessarily dwells only fleetingly on several divagations from the coherence I observe in his critical writing and his poetry.
Readings
Poems for study
‘Shadows’, ‘The Swing’, ‘In Light and Darkness’, ‘Genesis’, ‘Now That April’s Here’, ‘Sacred Ridges above Diamond Creek’, ‘The Thing Itself’, ‘An Elegy’, ‘Sunset Sky near Coober Pedy’, ‘Reality’, ‘Erstwhile’, ‘Timber’, ‘The Rescue Will Not Take Place’, ‘Cho Ben Thanh: Richmond’, ‘At the Clothesline’ (in ‘The Domestic Sublime’)
‘Shadows’, ‘The Swing’, ‘In Light and Darkness’, ‘Genesis’, ‘Now That April’s Here’, ‘Sacred Ridges above Diamond Creek’, ‘The Thing Itself’, ‘An Elegy’, ‘Sunset Sky near Coober Pedy’, ‘Reality’, ‘Erstwhile’, ‘Timber’, ‘The Rescue Will Not Take Place’, ‘Cho Ben Thanh: Richmond’, ‘At the Clothesline’ (in ‘The Domestic Sublime’)
Links to poems studied
POETRY ANALYSIS TECHNIQUE
Here is a method that you can you use. I find it very helpful indeed.
It is called TPCASTT. It is an an acronym and means:
T: Title
P: Paraphrase
C: Connotation
A: Attitude
S: Shift
T: Title
T: Theme.
CLICK HERE FOR THE PPT
Here is a method that you can you use. I find it very helpful indeed.
It is called TPCASTT. It is an an acronym and means:
T: Title
P: Paraphrase
C: Connotation
A: Attitude
S: Shift
T: Title
T: Theme.
CLICK HERE FOR THE PPT
Poetic devices
For help with your understanding of poetic devices at work, check out this website: The Poetry Archive