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My decision to write a biography of Vincent Buckley arose from a series of projects I had undertaken in relation to the generation of radicals who arrived in Australian universities after the Second World War. The reasons for this interest were largely autobiographical-these were the giants who had shaped the social and intellectual life of the university that I entered in 1951. My immediate interest was, however, historical-what influences had shaped them, what accounted for the differences in their responses, what the effects of these were, particularly on literature and literary culture in Australia. Originally, I had intended to include Buckley in Free Radicals-my book on post-war Melbourne radicals. I thought Buckley's Catholicism would offer a neat counterpoint to the Communism most of the others adopted, at least for a time. However, Buckley did not fit the frame. Their beliefs were too far removed from his, their lives governed by other motives. My personal relations with them had been quite different. More seriously, the others were primarily historians, journalists and political activists. Buckley was above all else a poet. His life had to be told in terms of the poetry that it produced.
This of course raises the whole question of how a poet's work relates to his life. Nothing of the life is irrelevant, but it may be misleading. It would be easy to write of Buckley as bon viveur, to fill a book with anecdotes of his social behaviour, and indeed he refers to these aspects of his life in his writing. To emphasise this element would, however, distort his life and distract the narrative from the nature of his poetic achievement. The same would be true of his politics, which appears more directly in his writing, but is still not its dominant concern. The book would have to include the history of his politics, but would need to show how he subsumed these concerns in the poetry. The same is true of his religion, and of his Irish connections, which gave me even more problems, as he came from a background totally alien to my own. Yet there is also a close parallel between the development of his religious thought and his poetic practice, so that to discuss the poetry is to...