Leslie Allan "Les" Murray is an Australian poet, anthologist and critic. His career spans over forty years and he has published nearly 30 volumes of poetry as well as two verse novels and collections of his prose writings. His poetry has won many awards and he is regarded as "the leading Australian poet of his generation".
Background
Leslie Allan Murray was born in 1938 in Nabiac, a village on the north coast of New South Wales Australia, and spent his childhood and youth on his father's dairy farm nearby. The area is sparsely populated, hilly, and forested, and the beauty of this rural landscape forms a backdrop to many of Murray's best poems, such as "Spring Hail": . .. Fresh-minted hills smoked, and the heavens swirled and blew away. he paddocks were endless again, and all around leaves lay beneath their trees, and cakes of moss. His parents were poor and their weatherboard house almost bare of comforts.
Education
He attended primary and early high school in Nabiac and then attended Taree High School. In 1957 he began study at the University of Sydney in the Faculty of Arts and joined the Royal Australian Navy Reserve to obtain a small income. Speaking about this time to Clive James he has said: "I was as soft-headed as you could imagine. I was actually hanging on to childhood because I hadn't had much teenage. My Mum died and my father collapsed. I had to look after him. So I was off the chain at last, I was in Sydney and I didn't quite know how to do adulthood or teenage. I was being coltish and foolish and childlike. I received the least distinguished degree Sydney ever issued. I don't think anyone's ever matched it. " He developed an interest in ancient and modern languages, which qualified him to become a professional translator at the Australian National University (where he was employed from 1963 to 1967). During his studies he met other poets and writers such as Geoffrey Lehmann, Bob Ellis, Clive James and Lex Banning as well as future political journalists Laurie Oakes and Mungo McCallum Jr. Between times, he hitch-hiked around Australia and lived briefly at a Sydney Push household at Milson's Point.
Career
He left Sydney University in 1960 without a degree, and in 1963, on the strength of his studies in modern languages, became a translator of foreign scholarly material at the Australian National University in Canberra. His first volume of poems, The Ilex Tree (written with Geoffrey Lehmann), won the Grace Leven Prize for poetry on its publication in 1965, and in the same year Murray made his first trip out of Australia, to attend the British Commonwealth Arts Festival Poetry Conference in Cardiff. His appetite whetted by this visit, he gave up his translator's post in 1967 and spent over a year traveling in Britain and Europe. Travel had the effect of cementing his Australian nationalism; he was a republican who believed that Australia should throw off the shackles of political and cultural dependence, and he saw his work as helping to achieve that end. A Writing Career On his return to Australia he resumed his studies, graduating from Sydney University in 1969. After that he earned his living as a full-time poet and writer. He was one of Australia's most influential literary critics and a prolific contributor of book reviews and literary articles to newspapers and journals, acted as poetry reader for the publisher Angus & Robertson from 1976 to 1991, edited the magazine Poetry Australiafrom 1973 to 1979, and became literary editor of the journal Quadrant in 1990. Three selections of his prose pieces appeared in volume form: The Peasant Mandarin (1978), Persistence in Folly (1984), and Blocks and Tackles (1990). However, it was his steady output of volumes of poetry that gave Murray his position of unchallenged eminence. In addition to The Ilex Tree, these include The Weatherboard Cathedral (1969), Poems Against Economics (1972), Selected Poems: The Vernacular Republic (1976), Ethnic Radio (1977), The Boys Who Stole the Funeral (1980), Equanimities (1982), The Vernacular Republic: Poems 1961-1981 (1982), The People's Otherworld (1983), The Daylight Moon (1987), The Idyll Wheel (1989), Dog Fox Field (1990), The Rabbiter's Bounty: Collected Poems (1992), Translations from the Natural World (1992), and Subhuman Redneck Poems (1996), for which he was honored with the T. S. Eliot Prize of poetry in January 1997. Murray's poems cover a great diversity and range, but a number of themes run through them from start to finish. Chief among these are his celebration of life and nature in all their diversity; his sense of the sanctity of human existence, and yet of its pathos as well; his association with 'the people, ' particularly common country folk, and a concomitant distrust of elites; and his strong sense of what it means to be an Australian, paradoxically combined with a deep-rooted cosmopolitanism resulting from his reading in a wide range of languages. His poetry is remarkable for its energy and for the bounding Elizabethan fecundity of its images. In the manner of the 17th-century poets too, it is often intellectually demanding, while never surrendering its claim to be popular. Its emotional range is very wide: Murray is a master of lightly humorous verse and of brilliant description, but he can also be deeply moving or bitingly satirical, as in the fine series of 'Police' poems he published in Lunch and Counter Lunch. He seldom plays with words merely for the sake of the play; his poetry has a passionately felt message to convey. It draws attention also by its variety of poetic forms: Murray is able to use free verse or the most difficult of traditional stanzaic forms with equal ease, and his work showed this flexibility from the very start of his career. Perhaps the most impressive demonstration of his technical skill came in The Boys Who Stole the Funeral, in which he produced a verse novel consisting of 140 sonnets. Since the volume makes a plea for the maintenance of order and traditional values, the formality of its structure can be seen as contributing directly to its meaning. This unity of form and content is evident in many of Murray's best poems. The Boys Who Stole the Funeral also further developed an element which had shown itself early on in Murray's work: a deep interest in Aboriginal poetry, and an ability to use the conventions and concerns of Aboriginal oral culture in poetry that is distinctively and maturely Australian, yet has a very wide appeal. His focus on the poor and dispossessed, his love of the land and his sense of its spiritual value, the importance of the clan in his writing (some of his best poems are about his family), all these are elements which link his work with Aboriginal culture. He was widely recognized as the outstanding poet of his generation in Australia, and he was the recipient of numerous awards and prizes. Murray also became an arbiter of Australian poetry in 1996 with the publication of The New Oxford Book of Australian Verse, which he edited. Murray was both praised and criticized for his democratizing of Australian poetry through his choice of entries. Until 1986 Murray lived chiefly in Sydney; afterwards he made his home on a small farm in Bunya, just a few miles from where he spent his boyhood, with his wife Valerie and the youngest of his five children. His volume of poems The Idyll Wheel reflects his sense of joyful renewal at this return to his rural roots. Subject of an ABC documentary in 1991 and short-listed for the T. S. Eliot prize in 1992, then winner of the European Petrarch Award in 1995 for his life's work of over 30 books, many translated in multiple foreign languages, Murray was gripped by diabetes and a "Black Dog" depression. He collapsed in 1996 and was hospitalized with a liver infection from which he emerged only after two operations, the last rites of the church, and 20 days in intensive care. Murray quipped that his doctors cut out not only part of his liver, but also his depression (with help from well-wishers worldwide), but his brush with death left him too weak to travel to England the next year when the T. S. Eliot prize finally became his. Prolific as he is, nearly as much has been written and spoken about Murray as by him. Among his admirers is Derek Walcott, who said, quoted in a 1992 issue of Commonweal, "There is no poetry in the English language now so rooted in its sacredness, so broad-leafed in its pleasures, and yet so intimate and so conversational. "
Politics
In 1972, Les Murray was one of a group of Sydney activists who launched the Australian Commonwealth Party, and authored its unusually idealistic campaign manifesto. During the 1970s he opposed the New Poetry or "literary modernism" which emerged in Australia at that time, and was a major contributor to what is known in Australian poetry circles as "the poetry wars". "One of his complaints against post-modernism was that it removed poetry from widespread, popular readership, leaving it the domain of a small intellectual clique". As American reviewer Albert Mobilio describes it, Murray "waged a campaign for accessibility".
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
Academic David McCooey described Murray in 2002 as "a traditional poet whose work is radically original".