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DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH
Thursday 10 November 2011
General Lecture Theatre No.1
INAUGURAL PROFESSORIAL LECTURE
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).
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
Like
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
9
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)
10
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).
11
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.
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