Louis Esson: Verse

ISBN — 978-1-7636064-0-1

This volume represents the first attempt to compile Louis Esson’s entire collection of verse.

To his Fasoli Bohemian comrades Esson was known as ‘the Poet of the Slums, ’ but his verse generally falls into the established Bulletin tropes: bush poems, political verse, ‘political pars’—verse responding to current news stories—and a splattering of his Bohemian subjects—what Hugh McCrae termed ‘the Vision aesthetic’ (in which satyrs and other mythological figures were portrayed an ‘amorous and thoroughly life-embracing spirits').

This material represents a particularly fascinating period in Australia’s literary history, and Esson makes a distinctive contribution. While he was not a trend-setter, he was prolific and he was ‘quoted,’ along with contemporaries Frank Williamson, Enid Derham, Hugh McCrae, Dorothy McKellar, Dorothy McCraw, Frank Wilmott, Nettie Palmer, Marie Pitt, Archibald T Strong, Dr L Rental, EJ Brady, Edward Dyson, GWL Marshall Hall, Vance Palmer, George Gordon McCraw in The Oxford Book of Australasian Verse (1919). 

Esson’s friend Katharine Susannah Prichard thought that his poetry was ‘his relaxation’—and his legacy is a vivid impression of his time.

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