This paper re-examines the poetry of Kenneth Slessor on the occasion of Geoffrey Dutton's biography of Kenneth Slessor being published this year, 20 years after the poet's death. By general consent Slessor is regarded as the father of modern Australian poetry. Divorced from the early Australian bush ballad, his poems deal with the universality of human themes in a psychological, philosophical and aesthetic mode, which had become prominent in modern poetry all over the world. Upon reading Dutton's biography and other recent articles on Slessor's poems, what impressed me most is the fact that the Literary Australian landscape up to the end of the World War 2 was very largely barren. Slessor was one of a few Australian poets who were consciously working on modern poetry, despite the fact that there was no favourable environment where they could expect an audience. His poems are essentially agnostic, descriptive and highly imaginative. Dutton's biography gave me little insight into the poet's creative mind; the poems - "Five Visions of Captain Cook", "Five Bells" and "Beach Burial" - I focus on his major preoccupation, the significance of human life when seen as a transitory moment in the passage of time. Slessor attempts to grasp at life's meaning through looking at such individuals as "Captain Cook", "Alexander Home", "Joe Lynch" and the "Unknown seaman". In these poems he succeeds in recreating the reality of their lives. Apart from his poetic themes his poetic diction is skilfully balanced and metered to the utmost phonetic effect. In doing so his poems present aspects of human existence and shades of human emotions. Australian literature has come into fashion since the 1960s and even today, some fifty years after he ceased to write, Slessor continues to play a significant role. This in itself is a tribute to this poet who achieved such a high quality of poetic expression, working in isolation in a country which, at that time, was still caught in its colonial past.

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