The Poetry of Adam Lindsay Gordon

In the 150 years since Adam Lindsay Gordon’s death in 1870 his reputation as a poet rose to great heights, celebrated as the “National Poet of Australia” with his bust in Westminster Abbey in 1934, only to decline to neglect and comparative obscurity. His first published book, The Feud (1864), was a poem in the manner of the Scots border ballads. Popularised in the nineteenth century by Sir Walter Scott, the ballads were a major inspiration to Gordon. His verse continued to appear anonymously and pseudonymously for the next five years when, as Marcus Clarke recalled in his preface (1876) to the reissue of Gordon’s Sea Spray and Smoke Drift (1867), “he discovered one morning that everybody knew a couplet or two of ‘How We Beat the Favourite’”. Although set in England, its account of a contemporary steeplechase proved immediately popular in Australia. “Within a few days every sporting man in Melbourne knew it by heart,” Sir Frank Madden confirmed in Edith…