Chris Wallace Crabbe

Life and career

Wallace-Crabbe was born in the Melbourne suburb of Richmond. His father was a journalist and his mother a pianist, and his brother Robin Wallace-Crabbe became an artist. He was educated at Scotch College, Yale University and the University of Melbourne, where for much of his life he has worked and is now a professor emeritus in the Australian Centre. He was Visiting Professor of Australian Studies at Harvard University and at the University of Venice, Ca'Foscari. He is also an essayist, a critic of the visual arts and a notable public reader of his verse. He was the founding director of the Australian Centre and, more recently, chair of the peak artistic body, Australian Poetry Limited.

After leaving school, Wallace-Crabbe set out to be a metallurgist, but was drawn back to his childhood interest in books and art. After training in the RAAF, he worked as an electrical trade journalist while studying for his B.A. in the evenings. He published his first book of poetry while doing his final honours year. In 1961 he became Lockie Fellow in Australian Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Melbourne.

Over the next decades he became a reader in English and then held a personal chair from 1988. On the initiative of H. C. "Nugget" Coombs, he was a Harkness Fellow at Yale University from 1965 to 1967, mixing widely with American writers and developing his poetry in new directions. In later years he has spent time in Italy, reading and translating Italian verse, including two contrast cantos from Dante. He was also a member of the Psychosocial Group, an occasional body with psychoanalytic as well as cultural interests.

Wallace-Crabbe's early collections were published in Australia, but in 1985 he began to publish with Oxford University Press, reaching an international public. Although he published some of his criticism and his one novel elsewhere, he remained with Oxford until 1998, after which date the Press ceased publishing live poets. He then took his work to Carcanet Oxford Poets, in Manchester. Back in Australia he brought out two books with the Sydney firm of Brandl & Schlesinger. One of these was a highly experimental long poem, or "zany epic", on which he had been working for a dozen years. It would be fair to say that this dense and difficult poem divided the poet's readers.

Reviewers over the years have drawn attention time and again to the energetic mixture of demotic and elevated language which very often marks Wallace-Crabbe's poetry. For the poet, this not only testifies to his wide interest in language but also to his sense of the stubborn plurality of our experience. Such mixed diction certainly persists in his very latest books, particularly in his sonnets and in the "Domestic Sublime" sequence of lyrics. This corresponds to his sense that poetry is, residually, a sacred art with its attention divided between ontology and finely-detailed epistemology. It should be added that for Wallace-Crabbe our lives unreasonably mingle the comic with the tragic.

Since his retirement from university teaching he has continued to live in inner Melbourne, adhering to poetry, reading history and playing tennis.

In May 2014, Wallace-Crabbe alluded to the possibility of a collaboration with a Melbourne writer, Christopher Bantick, However, he is currently working on the history of Western magic. and on a series of prints, with Kristin Headlam, based upon his long poem, mentioned above.

Awards