Background
Brennan was born on 1 January in 1870 in Sydney. His father was Christopher Brennan (died 1919), a brewer, and his wife Mary Ann (died 1924).
Brennan was born on 1 January in 1870 in Sydney. His father was Christopher Brennan (died 1919), a brewer, and his wife Mary Ann (died 1924).
In March 1888 Christopher went to the University of Sydney where to all appearances he led an adventurous, wayward life. None of his university teachers could stimulate him profoundly; for some, such as Professor Walter Scott, he felt little more than contempt. But for the first time he began to form strong and lasting friendships, with men of or near his own age, including J. B. Peden, A. B. Piddington, Dowell O'Reilly and J. Le Gay Brereton. As a student, Brennan distinguished himself for his scandalous neglect of set texts, and his ability to get good results without appearing to try. As editor of Hermes (1889-90) and as a prankster he seemed to his fellow students 'just a rollicking carefree chap'.
Brennan's place in Australian literature is as paradoxical as his character. At a conscious level, Australia and its writers count for little in his poetry, which makes few overt reference to the landscape and society, and hardly draws at all from Australian literature. Yet he read widely in the works of his contemporaries and predecessors, and the poetry of Henry Kendall, which he greatly admired, is subliminally present in his own work, especially 'The wanderer'. A striking indication that Australia counted for a great deal in Brennan's life as a writer may be seen in the fact that, although he abhorred Henry Lawson as a poet and a man, the progress of their lives was hauntingly similar: promise, achievement, degeneration, disgrace, posthumous legend. The comparison with Lawson, and with earlier writers such as Marcus Clarke, Daniel Deniehy, Adam Lindsay Gordon and Kendall, shows that Brennan's life followed a pattern common among Australian writers. Like them he helped to create a national literary tradition which broke down the loneliness felt by so many writers; in his turn, like them, he suffered from and was partly destroyed by that loneliness.
But Brennan's poetry stands largely outside the mainstream of Australian poetic development. In its attempt to follow the example of the French Symbolists, it was the first of its kind ever to be written here. With its clotted diction and extreme Victorian poeticism, it could not be directly emulated by later generations. None the less some of the most important later poets, such as Robert FitzGerald, A. D. Hope, Judith Wright and James McAuley found in his work a point of reference and departure, because he was the first Australian to write within, and be worthy of, the great European philosophical-poetic tradition. His interest in human sexuality and psychology, especially the unconscious, and his attempt to use the French Symbolists as a basic model, link Brennan to British writers such as Eliot, Yeats and D. H. Lawrence, although his achievement hardly matches theirs.
Despite his essentially European manner, and interests, Brennan's audience was and remains almost exclusively Australian. Even if he failed both in his search for Magian enlightenment through poetic symbol, and in his related attempt to create a 'livre compos
After Brennan's marriage broke up in 1922, he went to live with Violet Singer. as a result of both his divorce and increasing drunkenness.