The Poems Of Henry Kendall

The Poems of Henry Kendall is a collected edition of the poetry of Henry Kendall, the Australian poet who lived from 1839 to 1882. Such collected editions appeared in various formats in the years after Kendall’s early death from tuberculosis, gathering together the substantial body of poetry he had produced across a relatively short literary career and presenting it in a single volume suitable for readers wanting all his major work in one place.

Kendall is generally considered the first major Australian poet to find a fully realized voice for the distinctive landscape of the new continent, alongside his contemporary Adam Lindsay Gordon who worked in a somewhat different mode. The collected Poems brings together his various published collections including Poems and Songs of 1862, Leaves From Australian Forests of 1869, and the various later magazine pieces that had been gathered into the final collection Songs from the Mountains of 1880, along with various uncollected and posthumous pieces that the editors of the collected edition had been able to gather from his manuscripts and from his magazine appearances.

The collected volume gives a fuller picture of Kendall’s range than any single one of the individual collections could provide. The Australian nature poetry that established his reputation is well represented, with the major pieces including Bell Birds, September in Australia, and the various poems set in particular locations of the New South Wales coast and the Blue Mountains. There are also the more personal and reflective pieces that Kendall produced across his career, the historical and biographical poems on Australian subjects, and the various religious and philosophical pieces that occupied him particularly in his later years when his religious sensibilities were developing.

Kendall was working in the broadly Romantic and Victorian poetic tradition that he had inherited from his English reading, particularly Wordsworth, Tennyson, Swinburne, and Matthew Arnold. The Australian setting gave his work its distinctive quality, and the slow development across his career of an authentically Australian poetic voice is one of the more interesting things to watch in the collected edition.

The book runs to several hundred pages and is essential reading for anyone interested in nineteenth century Australian poetry. It pairs naturally with the individual collections and with the work of Adam Lindsay Gordon and the slightly later A B Paterson.