(1927-1988)
Seven
of Vincent Buckley's great-grandparents were Irish, and Ireland was
a strong and constant presence in the work of this Australian poet,
teacher and critic.
Buckley took his BA and MA from the University of Melbourne, following
this with a period of study at Cambridge. He was appointed Lockie Fellow
in the Department of English at Melbourne in 1958, then awarded a personal
Chair in 1967. During the late 1950s and early 1960s the Department
housed a remarkable number of influential poets, including Philip Martin,
Evan Jones and Chris Wallace-Crabbe as well as Buckley. His period as
poetry editor of the Bulletin, from 1961 to 1963, saw the publication
of many new poets.
His seven volumes of poetry range from the intensely personal and intimate
to rumination on the past and present of Ireland and Irish politics.
His critical writing includes volumes on poetry, the novelist Henry
Handel Richardson, and the Campion paintings by Leonard French. Buckley
was a key figure in Catholic intellectual debate of the period, a time
in which the Australian Labor movement was grappling with the Cold War
and the emergence of the DLP. Buckley and Frank Knopfelmacher, both
on campus and through the pages of Quadrant, were influential polemicists.
Buckley's autobiography, Cutting Green Hay: Friendships, Movements
and Cultural Conflicts in Australia's Great Decades, published in 1983,
provides a valuable insight into the 20 years following the end of World
War II.
He was a charismatic lecturer and few who heard his impersonation of
WB Yeats's fulmination on the modernist poetry of TS Eliot would ever
forget it. His essays on Slessor, Fitzgerald, Hope, Wright and McAuley
remain influential.
Buckley was awarded the Dublin Prize, the University's award for an
outstanding contribution to art, music, literature or science in 1977
and the Christopher Brennan Award from the Fellowship of Australian
Writers in 1982.
