Chris Wallace-Crabbe was a poet of international renown, a beloved teacher and a generous man

Chris Wallace-Crabbe, who died at the age of 91 on Tuesday, was one of Australia’s best-known and best-loved poets. He was one of the few Australian poets of his generation, or any other, to have a significant international reputation.

His literary career stretches back over 60 years, to his debut collection, The Music of Division, published by Angus & Robertson in 1959. My copy of the book, only slightly foxed, is signed and dated by its author in May 1960, and then again, dedicated to me, in December 1997.

This sense of history – of the links across time and space – seems especially appropriate for a poet whose work was so wide-ranging in interest, so generous in its attention to people and things, and so sensitive to the continuities and discontinuities between times and places.

Wallace-Crabbe was born in Richmond, Melbourne, in 1934, the son of a journalist and a pianist, and the elder brother of Robin Wallace-Crabbe, the renowned artist and writer.

He was an enthusiastic traveller and held a number of international academic appointments, including at Harvard University, but Melbourne was a constant in his life and work. He lived almost his entire life in the Victorian capital and had a long and distinguished academic career at the University of Melbourne. Indeed, along with colleagues, such as Vincent Buckley and R.A. Simpson, he was for a long time considered one of the “Melbourne poets”, a term that took in the university as much as the city.

He was one of the earliest teachers of creative writing as a university subject, and he was instrumental in the development of Australian studies as a discipline, being the founding director of the Australia Centre at the University of Melbourne, where he was emeritus professor at the time of his death.

It is appropriate that two of the numerous literary awards that Wallace-Crabbe received in his career were The Age Book of the Year Award (in 1995) and the Melbourne Prize for Literature (in 2015).

Wallace-Crabbe’s early work is notable, in part, for its attention to Australian suburbia, a subject largely ignored or denigrated at the time. To some extent, Wallace-Crabbe belonged to a transitional poetic generation, one that linked the traditionalism of older poets, such as James McAuley and Rosemary Dobson, with the experimentalism of the so-called “Generation of ’68” poets, such as John Forbes and Laurie Duggan.

This interplay between oppositions is characteristic of Wallace-Crabbe’s work, which playfully brings together the local and the international, the historical and the contemporary, the vernacular and the bookish. This last can be seen in Trace Elements, from Rungs of Time (1993), in which the poet meditates on the age-old theme of the dead:

Space-time is no longer their medium;they inhabitantipodes of the radiant fair dinkum,post-Heisenberg, transphysical, post-Planck,taunting us with quips of antimatter.

As this suggests, Wallace-Crabbe had a catholic, transdisciplinary love of knowledge. He was fond of citing in conversation the philosopher Isaiah Berlin’s idea that writers and thinkers were either “hedgehogs” (who know “one big thing” and prefer unity and coherence) or “foxes” (who know “many things” and are comfortable with plurality and ambiguity). He proudly identified as a fox.

Part of this foxiness was the way his interest in the theoretical and abstract was always balanced by a loving attention to the “twiggy particular”, as he called it in Stuff Your Classical Heritage from I’m Deadly Serious (1988).

Ultimately, Wallace-Crabbe’s concern with oppositions means that he was most profoundly a tragicomic poet, with the elegiac and the comedic characteristically found within the same poem. As he said in an interview in 1990 with Barbara Williams, “the comic mode, in the fullest, most complicated, sense takes in enormous contradictions and essentially asserts that, given these contradictions, something goes on. I think of that as a basis for my writing: tragedy, taken far enough, ends up as comedy.” Wallace-Crabbe’s concern with the elegiac themes of mortality, loss and transience was most profoundly challenged by the tragic death of his adult son, Ben, in 1986. In the first of a number of poems about this terrible event, An Elegy, Wallace-Crabbe movingly wishes to …pluck my son,out of dawn’s moist air […]like a pink-tinged angeland gather him gasping back into this life. While some early critics had found Wallace-Crabbe worked at something of a remove from the emotional intensities of real life, relying especially on irony, these elegies show that his poetry could be emotionally intense, even as it engaged in the stylistic affordances of lyric poetry.