David Mason at First Things:
Les Murray, who died at age 80 on April 29, has been called Australia’s greatest poet, but such an encomium meant little to him.
Murray grew up in dire poverty on a farm with no electricity or running water, and always felt exiled from the privileged classes. Largely self-educated, at university he was so poor he ate the scraps he found on plates in the cafeteria. Profoundly asocial, he once called himself “a bit of a stranger to the human race.” He also suffered at times from debilitating depression, and was bullied in school for being bookish and fat. Yet he transformed his sense of personal injury to a poetic voice of rigor and flexibility, humor and empathy, and enormous formal range. He was a generous anthologist and editor as well as an essayist, poet, and verse novelist. “It was a very great epiphany for me,” he once said, “to realize that poetry is inexhaustible, that I would never get to the end of its reserves.”
more here.