Christopher Brennan

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Christopher Brennan (1 November 1870 - 5 October 1932) was an Australian poet.

He was born in Sydney, Australia, to a brewer, and was educated at St Ignatius' College, Riverview. Entering the University of Sydney in 1888, he abandoned his faith, taking up studies in the Classics instead. He won a travelling scholarship to Berlin, where he met his future wife, and where he encountered the poetry of Stéphane Mallarmé. About this time, he decided to become a poet. Returning to Australia, he took up a position as a cataloguer in the public library, before being given a position at the University of Sydney. In 1914, he produced his major work, Poems: 1913. Later, in the 1920s, he had an affair with Violet Singer, the Vie of his later poems, and, as a result of both his divorce and increasing drunkenness, he was removed from his position at the University. The death of Vie in an accident left him distraught, and he spent most of his remaining years in poverty. He died in 1932, after developing cancer.

Brennan was not a lyric poet. It was not emotion that drove his work, rather, it displays at its best an architectural, and mythological resonance that informs it. His chief work was designed to be read as a single poem, complete, yet formed of smaller works. It covers not only the basic details of his life, such as his wooing of his wife in the early portions, but also human profundities through mythology, as in the central Lilith section, and the Wanderer sequence. As such, it is among the most widely discussed works of Australian poetry, judging from the prominence of criticism about it and Brennan.

Brennan belonged to no real clique in Australian letters. Neither a balladist, nor a member of the emergent “Vision” school, his closest affinities are with the generation of the 1890s, such as Victor Daley. This is not surprising since the bulk of his work was produced during this period. However his importance in Australian letters rests upon the seriousness he approached his task as a poet and his influence upon some later poets, such as Vincent Buckley.

It has been argued that Brennan is Australia’s greatest poet, though this is no longer widely held to be the case.