NOEL MACAINSH: Aestheticism and Reality in the Poetry of Kenneth Slessor

It may seem a little surprising to consider Kenneth Slessor, who was born in the year 1901, in a context of aestheticism and fin-de-siècle writing. Such a procedure may seem more appropriate to earlier Australian authors such as Christopher Brennan, Hugh McCrae or Victor Daley. Nevertheless, the influence of the Aesthetic Movement, of certain nineteenth-century French authors, directly or via English authors and artists, on the work of Kenneth Slessor and other Australian writers, has been widely noted by critics here, if not examined in detail. The Aesthetic Movement represented a devotion to beauty as a good in itself in a materialistic world which otherwise seemed chaotic and depressing; it thus rejected theories which held that the value of literature is somehow related to morality or to some sort of usefulness, and instead advocated, in defiance of much tradition and of the bourgeoisie, the independence of art from any moral or didactic end.