THE UNIVERSITY OF SYDNEY

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH
Thursday 10 November 2011
General Lecture Theatre No.1
INAUGURAL PROFESSORIAL LECTURE

SYDNEY UNIVERSITY: PURE POETRY

INTRODUCTION OF THE PROFESSORIAL LECTURE
The Hon. Michael Kirby AC CMG

Geoffrey Lehmann, Prof. Barry Spurr, Michael Kirby

BA (1959), LLB (1962), BEc (1966), LLM (1967), Hon. LLD (1996). One time Fellow of the Senate of the
University of Sydney (1964-69); President, Sydney University Union (1964-65); President, Sydney University
Students Representative Council (1961-62); Justice of the High Court of Australia (1996-2009).

UNDER THE JACARANDAS

On this beautiful Spring evening, we return to the Quadrangle of the
University of Sydney for a festive occasion. To welcome us back, the
jacarandas are in full exam time bloom. The carillon is sounding its
stately harmony. In anticipation of the lecture we are to receive, it is a
joy to be alive.
I was intending to open these remarks, designed to introduce the lecture
and the lecturer, with some prideful comments about the superiority of
English verse and its centrality in the poetry of the whole world.
However, prudently, the organisers arranged for us to meet before this
lecture in the Nicholson Museum of the University. There, as we partook
of modest libations, we were surrounded by treasures from antiquity. To
be specific, the creations of the early Etruscans were arranged to recall
for us the antiquity of Western civilisation. And of the culture of human
beings long ago and far away, when England was a state unknown and
its language undreamt of by the Etruscans or anyone else.

The

ancients had poetry, and art, and wars, and loves. It was a savage act
to take us first to such a place on such a night as this.
Just the same, we who speak the English language, particularly if we
know it as our native tongue, realise what a treasure house it affords to
is recipients. How specially suitable it is for literature, and particularly for
poetry. There are very practical reasons why this should be so. Our
language is a magical mixture of the tongue of the Anglo-Saxons who
settled in Britain in pre-historic times; the formal Norman French brought
to the British Isles by William the Conqueror and his soldiers and
officials; a sprinkling of Celtic words; and then the huge influx of

language borrowed from the peoples of the intercontinental Empire upon

which, even into my youth, the sun never set.
It is by the accident of this global family of nations, with coaling stations
scattered around the globe to serve the fleet, that the English language
has (at least at this time) become a kind of universal language, in a way
that none other has yet done. These historical facts were brought home
to Australians by the recent Commonwealth Heads of Government
Meeting in Perth, which the Queen opened, presenting us with a visible
link back to the days of Empire. For every concept, idea, metaphor or
simile in the English language, there are usually at least two
expressions: one from the Saxon roots and the other from the Norman.
The lawyers know this with their last will and testament. The poets
know i,t for it gives them a great treasury of language upon which to
draw.
Familiarity with English language poetry begins, for most of us, with our
parents and in our childhood homes. This was where I struck it rich. My
father had learned from his mother to cherish English literature and
poetry. At his knee, I learned serious poems, well beyond the nursery
rhymes like Little Miss Muffett and Hickory Dickery Dock. Not for us,
his children, were there Australian books like The Magic Pudding. Oh
no. We were raised in the didactic stories of the Brothers Grimm, with
their stern moral lessons for life.

And in the 1950s, my father at

Christmas raised a loan from an understanding bank manager to

purchase books and recordings for us.

The latter, through the

marvellous voices of Gielgud, Olivier, Richardson, Redgrave and

Ashcroft introduced us to the special poetry of Shakespeare.

In my day, in public schools, at Summer Hill Opportunity School and Fort

Street High School, we were required to learn huge amounts of English
verse by heart. My brother Donald tells me how I would walk around the
family home flagellating myself with a ruler, until I got it right. My siblings
followed.

We still draw our dividends from that bank today.

Like

Rumpole of the Bailey, we still walk around with snatches of English

verse rattling through our brains. When we are sure that we are in a
private space, we cry out those poems, for poetry often needs to be said
aloud to be cherished to the full.
INTO THE MIDDLE DISTANCE
Then, a wonderful thing happened to my siblings and me. One by one in
the years between 1956 and 1962, came up from high school to this
famous university.

Each of us undertook the study of English I and

English II before we were cast out of heaven to the barbarian confines of

the law. And in English I, we each became acquainted with three fine
scholars and teachers to whom we owe an eternal debt that I
acknowledge today.

I refer to Gerald Wilkes, Emeritus Professor of

English Literature at this university, who held the Challis Chair between
1966 and 1996. Like us, he was a product of public schools where
poetry was lovingly taught.
Department in 1952.

Professor Wilkes began in the English

He was thus there to teach us as we passed

through.
Thelma Herring taught me a course on Four Centuries of English
Sonnets. It started with Francis Bacon, I think, and finished with poets
whom I had never heard of at school: the Sitwells writing at the time of
the 1940 Nails Upon the Cross. And others who proclaimed that they

were looking lovingly ... over the kitchen sink. Thelma Herrings poems
were a long way from Tennyson.
It was her fate to teach us in the vast space of the Wallace Lecture
Theatre, where a great array of future judges and others assembled in
search of the inspiration she plainly felt and was determined to convey.
As she said the words of the sonnets, she would look to the far corners
of the lecture hall, as if evading our eyes, lest the emotions she was
feeling became too strong. She was a great teacher. She was never
appointed to a chair. This university, so generous to its students, was
not, in those days, particularly generous to its finest teachers. It has
taken until now for it to create a Chair of Poetry and Poetics, whose
establishment we celebrate today.
Thelma Herring was greatly loved by me and by my brothers, although
we never told her so.

Now, tonight, I try to repay my debt to her.

Thinking on her lectures makes it all the more painful to realised that it
has taken so long to establish a chair of the University dedicated to her
metier.
Another wonderful teacher of those days was Ron Dunlop. He too was
never elevated to a chair. He laboured, year upon year, to bring the
intense feeling he experienced about poetry to classrooms of many
hundreds. It must sometimes have been dispiriting. At the end of his
service, he was made an Associate Professor.

Yet if titles were

accorded in proportion to the impact of one spirit on many others, he

deserved much more.

My brother Donald has recalled how Ron Dunlop would read, or say, the
poems that he had prepared for our instruction, not looking to the
farthest corner of the Wallace Theatre, but into the middle distance. It
was as if he too was prisoner to his deep emotions. He had a beautiful,
sonorous voice, just a little filtered and with the tiniest of tremors.
Standing there, in front of us, he shared with us wonderful examples of
poetry which he then helped us to analyse and understand beyond our
feelings. And when he did so, he would savour the words.
I remember one poem that he seemed to specially love, particularly
when he arrived at the last verse where the rhythm abruptly changed.
He said the poem, by Walter de la Mare, with great feeling. Magically,
he was able to convey the emotions to those us with ears to hear:
Slim cunning hands at rest, and cozening eyes
Under this stone one loved too wildly lies.
How false she was no granite could declare,
Nor all Earths flowers how fair.
When Ron Dunlop reached the end, it was as if he had to take a grip on
his emotions, letting the words hang in the air whilst he returned to the
task in hand: teaching undergraduates what he instinctively knew. In
the 1970s, or perhaps the 1980s, when I had won a certain notoriety in
the law, I tracked him down through the Department. I wrote to him to
thank him for his lectures and for his emotions, publicly conveyed. I
should have done that more often in my life. He lived at Mosman, or at
least somewhere over that side. I received a friendly typed letter in
reply. But I never met him again after I once departed in 1958 for the
downtown law school.

In celebrating tonights event, we must therefore place it in context. We

must remember the great teachers of English poetry who have gone
before in this place. It matters not that some of them were undecorated
with professorial honours.

They were the teachers of thousands of

students who became a little more rounded and better able to appreciate
life, because of the thoughts and feelings they shared with them. In
honouring Barry Spurr, we honour those who preceded him. I know that
he too honours Wilkes, Herring and Dunlop, and doubtless many more
whom I did not know. Those who are heroes today arrived where they
are by standing on the shoulders of those who preceded, and taught,
them.
STUDENTS TURNED POETS
Whereas most of the students who sat in those cavernous halls went on
to pursue careers as teachers, lawyers, clerks, some were sufficiently
fired up to themselves become poets of renown.

They too sat in

classrooms on this campus, perhaps in this very room where we are

gathered for todays inaugural lecture. They had a special gift and some
are now famous poets in their own right.
If life was sometimes hard for a young gay man, in the years of my
instruction by Wilkes, Herring and Dunlop, they were no better for fat
students who sat with us in those classrooms. I now turn those years of
pain into countless speeches in prose, railing against a world that
continues such wrongs. Les Murray has expressed his pain of that time
in some memorable verse:
I met a tall adopted girl some kids thought aloof,
but she was intelligent. Her poise of white-blond hair
proved her no kin to the squat tanned couple who loved her.
Only now do I realise she was my first love.
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But all my names were fat-names, at my new town school.

Between classes, kids did erocide: destruction of sexual morale.
Mass refusal of unasked love; that works.
Boys cheered as 17-year old girls came on to me,
Then ran back whinnying ridicule.
...
She I admired, and almost relaxed from placating,
Was gnawed by knowing what she came from, not who.
Showing off was my one social skill, oddly never with her
but I dissembled feelings, til mine were unknown to me too.
The powerful image of whinnying ridicule sears the mind with the
recollected pain that it re-tells so many decades later.
Another fine Australian poet was taught in these halls, Geoffrey
Lehmann. He was to become an exemplary adviser in taxation law and
practice. And yet he has also become one of Australias most admired
poets. Recently, with Robert Gray, he published a wonderful anthology:
Australian Poetry Since 17881. A few days ago, at the Sydney Institute
no less, Lehmann and Gray provocatively addressed the question: Are
Australians better at poetry than at sport? One suspects from their
recent anthology that they believe that an affirmative answer should be
given to this question. If only we lived in a country where as much news
print, adoration, adulation, admiration were lavished on our poets as on
our sporting heroes. Tonight we can try to turn the tide.
Almost certainly written in this hall, or perhaps in the old Fisher Library
along the way, Geoffrey Lehmann wrote a poem which he dedicated to
my brother Donald2. The poet remembers the time of exams. Doubtless
when written, the jacarandas were in earlier full bloom:

1
2

G. Lehmann and R. Gray, Australian Poetry Since 1788 (UNSW Press, 2011)
G. Lehmann, After the Examinations Chinese-Style.

So we have passed!
The evening sky was hot and starlit
And static lightening flickered on and off,
Silent and meaningless.
We must get drunk, I cried, in the brothel quarter.
Yes, I suppose we must, my friend replied.
But listen to the crickets endless singsong.
Now we have passed, we have before us everything and nothing,
Wives, children, service to the Emperor,
Another fifty years to choose exactly
Which sword to fall upon.
Look at our footprints in the dust.
They only lead to us.
We wear our feet out just to reach ourselves.
But look, old boy, I said,
The moon is wine, the night is jasmine scented,
I can see lights from under doorways.
I can hear flutes and women in silk dresses.
The students in the classrooms of great teachers of poetry who
themselves have turned their hand to the art are special disciples. In
honouring the teachers, we also hold out the hope for many such
precious pupils.
A PROFESSOR OF POETRY AND POETICS
And so we turn to invite Barry Spurr to give his inaugural lecture as
Professor of Poetry and Poetics of this university. His schooling was in
Canberra and he came to the University of Sydney because of the
renown of its Department of English.
Professor Spurr always knew that poetry was what he wanted to study
and to teach. After post-graduate studies at the University of Oxford, he
came back to this university to be appointed to the Department of
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English in 1976. Like Wilkes, Herring, Dunlop and others before him, he
has given bounteously to students and colleagues in this place. And
justice has prevailed. He has been honoured with a personal chair.
Still, it is one that stands the risk of oblivion when he surrenders it. This
must not be. It has taken more than 220 years of this nations modern
life to get around to creating a Chair of Poetry and Poetics. It should
become a permanent chair: one that celebrates the discipline forever.
One that is always there for great scholars, critics and also, perhaps,
occasional respected practitioners of the poetic arts. Oxford University
has long had such a chair and those who have held it are greatly
honoured in the Academy and Society: showered with civil honours,
knighthoods and damehoods. Oh to live in a country where poets were
as commonly named in the Honours List as muscular sporting
champions. The mental muscle too has a place in Australia.
Barry Spurr has concentrated in his professional life on poetry alone. He
has been doing it for 35 years. He is now the longest serving member of
the English Department. The personal chair allows him to continue with
this precise focus. So it should be in the future.
He is renowned throughout the world for his writing and scholarship.
Referees for his appointment included Sir Christopher Ricks, Professor
of Poetry at Oxford. Like Barry Spurr, he is a Milton and Eliot scholar.
Professor Spurrs recent book on T.S. Eliots spirituality3 has been
showered with praise. Peter Milward, in a long and considered account,
declares:

3

Barry Spurr, Anglo-Catholics in Religion: T.S. Eliot and Christianity (2010, Lutterworth Press,
Cambridge)

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There can be no doubt about it. Even having read through the
growing conglomeration of bibliographical items on this major poet
of the 20th century, I have no doubt that this study of T.S. Eliot and
Christianity by Barry Spurr is quite the best book on the man and
his work that has yet appeared. It has to be. Not only has the
author assembled a vast array of sources, including personal
acquaintance with Eliots widow Valerie, the doyenne of Eliot
scholars in England Dame Helen Gardner (who was his supervisor
at Oxford), as well as an insider knowledge of the varied
ramifications of the Anglican Church, considered as inclusive of
Anglo-Catholicism, but he has succeeded in combining all together
in an eminently readable form, so as to bring to light much about
the reclusive poet that has hitherto remained in obscurity. And not
only that. He has dared to break through the taboo, largely
fostered by Eliot himself with his impersonal theory of poetry, on
any association between the man and his work, and particularly
between the poet and his religion.
The only fault, indeed, that I, as an Anglican, can find in Professor Spurr
is that he has (temporarily I beg to hope) crossed over to Rome: a
gesture that Anglicans tend to think takes Anglo-Catholicism just a
smidgen too far.
Perhaps Barry Spurr needs to be reminded on the poetical Collects of
Thomas Cranmer, martyred Archbishop of Canterbury, whose Book of
Common Prayer is, with the King James Bible and the plays of
Shakespeare, the jewel room of the treasury of English poetry:
O God, who are the author of peace and lover of concord. in
knowledge of whom standeth our eternal life, whose service is
perfect freedom, Defend us, thy humble servants in all assaults of
our enemies, that we, surely trusting in thy defence, may not know
the power of any adversary, through the might of Jesus Christ our
Lord. Amen4

Second Collect for Peace in the service of Morning Prayer, Book of Common Prayer (1547, p54).

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Eliot was said to dislike the Romantics. But now some interesting things
are happening to our professorial hero, Barry Spurr, despite his
engagement with Eliot. Freshly professorialised, he has become closely
involved (as I am) in the cause of animal welfare: an epiphany that
relies in part upon mind but in part upon ones emotions5. He has also
embraced an interest in the large current challenge of obesity in our
society.

Above all, he has become associated with the Australian

Research Council Centre on the study of the Emotions6. Who know

where this new embrace of the emotions may take him in a roller-coaster
ride of his professorial life?
I know that Barry Spurr is also concerned, from his professorial seat, to
encourage an improvement of the teaching of poetry in schools. That is
where, for most, a lifelong love of poetry must start. If it were not likely
to attract the eagle eye of DOCS, I would propose that he should
suggest training of students in the art of self-flagellation, so as to beat
the rhythm and rhyme and shock and thrill of poetry into the deepest
recesses of the brain and body: to lie in wait there so as to burst forth
when least expected. When travelling in Turkey. When alone in a great
cathedral in Mexico. Or just before the heavy dew of sleep takes the
erstwhile student into the suspension of consciousness: deaths brother.
The Etruscan poets would be proud of what we are doing tonight. We
are celebrating the great achievements of a teacher and scholar of
poetry: Barry Spurr. More than that, we are honouring poetry in our
country in a way that has been too long neglected and must never again
be overlooked.

5
6

The University of Sydney newly established Human Animal Research Network.

The Australian Research Councils Centre of Excellence Project for the History of the Emotions.

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I invite Barry Spurr, Professor of Poetry and Poetics of the University of

Sydney, to deliver his inaugural professorial lecture on The Bliss of
Solitude.
*******

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