Name Vincent Buckley Role Poet | Awards Christopher Brennan Award | |
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Died November 12, 1988, Melbourne, Australia Books Golden builders and other poems, Memory Ireland | ||
Education University of Melbourne | ||
Vincent Thomas Buckley (1925–1988) was an Australian poet, teacher, editor, essayist and critic.
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Life
He was born in 1925 in Romsey, Victoria and was educated at the University of Melbourne and St. Catharine's College, Cambridge. He served in the Royal Australian Air Force during the Second World War. He died in Melbourne in 1988.
Buckley edited the magazine, Prospect, from 1958 to 1964, and, during this period, was also the poetry editor of the Bulletin from 1961 until 1963. Between 1967 and 1979, he lived for periods in Ireland where he founded the Committee for Civil Rights.
He was the Lockie Fellow at the University of Melbourne from 1958 to 1960 and, in 1967, he held a personal Chair in Poetry. He was awarded the Christopher Brennan Award in 1982.
In 1992 The Vincent Buckley Poetry Prize was established in his honour to promote connections between Australian and Irish poets and poetry.
Themes and subject matter
His subject matter ranged from the personal to the political, with a particular interest in Irish politics, culture and history. Buckley was also heavily involved in Catholic intellectual debate during the period of the Cold War and the emergence in Australia of the DLP.
His critical writing includes volumes on poetry, the novelist Henry Handel Richardson, and Leonard French's Campion paintings.