Australian poetry classics: Francis Webb, the 20th century’s ‘most unjustly neglected poet’, is our best kept literary secret

In this series, we explore influential Australian poems.

There are giants of Australian literature who are household names, and those who once were but are no longer. Francis Webb (1925–73) fits firmly in the latter category. His works are rarely quoted in public life, inscribed on public art or taught in schools.

Webb’s case tells us much about the shifting character and nature of Australian literature, for he has never been completely forgotten either. His reputation endures in a strange space where a writer regarded by the cream of his generation and generations since as an unmatched “poet’s poet” can also be simultaneously unknown to most readers today.

Webb would hardly have minded. He saw right through fame from the start. It is no accident that the colonial villains he dramatises in early poems, such as A Drum for Ben Boyd (1948) and Morgan’s Country (1952), are vainglorious, corrupt and self-serving. To a Poet (1943), written when Webb was 18, derides the revered poets of his own era thus:

Now yours is the grand power, great for good or evil:
The schoolboy (poor devil!) will be told off to study you.
On hills over the sky you have set your plinths of stone.
You have crushed yourself, alone, in unscented, unstarred valleys.

In Cap and Bells (1943–45), he dedicates himself to the role of holy fool, in keeping with his namesake St Francis of Assisi, who was known as the “fool of God”. Webb ends this early poem silently declaring to himself, on a crowded train on the Harbour Bridge,

I have chosen the little, obscure way
In the dim shouting vortex; I have taken
A fool’s power in his cap and bells.

As the poem makes clear, fools are not only servants of a higher truth; they are truth-tellers who can laugh in the face of kings, just as much as in the face of death or war or modernity.

A meteoric rise

Webb grew up in North Sydney during the 1930s. He was only 14 when World War II broke out. Around this time, he developed a fascination with poetry. One of his teachers at St Pius X College in Chatswood recalled his burning desire to be published in the most widely-read literary forum of the era, the “Red Page” of the Bulletin.

As the war raged, Webb finished high school at Christian Brothers High School in Lewisham, coming second in the state for English in the NSW Leaving Certificate. He could have enrolled at Sydney University, but instead chose the army, then the air force. He trained as a RAAF wireless air gunner in Canada, but never saw active service. During this time, he became briefly engaged to a Canadian woman in Winnipeg, his only recorded relationship, later recalled in For Ethel (1952).

Webb wanted his work to be known, but not the expectations that came with it. In the few short years after Palace of Dreams (1942) first appeared in the Bulletin, Webb became essential reading for acolytes of the Red Page. He was praised to the skies by its influential editor Douglas Stewart, anthologised by Kenneth Slessor in Australian Poetry 1945 and had his debut collection A Drum for Ben Boyd (1948) illustrated by Norman Lindsay.

The latter was published in hardback by the formidable Angus and Robertson and turned Webb into a prize-winning poet, taking out the 1948 Grace Leven Award.

Any serious poet of Webb’s age would have given their right arm for such a meteoric rise and lofty praise. Yet Webb ran from it. In 1947, he returned to live in Canada, concerned that “too much praise, a bit stultifying, had been accorded me […] I yearned for full freedom and solitude”.

While working as a farmhand and manuscript editor in Toronto, he wrote most of his second collection, Leichhardt in Theatre (1952). Reviewers of the era were taken with the title sequence about the 1848 disappearance of Prussian explorer Ludwig Leichhardt. All ignored a smaller piece called On First Hearing a Cuckoo, set in an unspecified English hospital after

dinner, when the dissolute green
Summoned to bedside each image, unelectric
Against lights out … A dead word-haunted man.

This is the first poem by a major Australian poet set in a mental hospital. It was written from experience, after Webb left Canada for England in 1949 and had a breakdown in London not long after arriving.

Webb returned to Australia in 1950, where he self-published his third collection Birthday (1953), which featured long works about the good and evil extremes of humanity, from the life of St Francis (The Canticle) to a radio play about Hitler’s last days (Birthday), later broadcast on the BBC.

Webb’s third collection also contained short pieces sympathetic to migrants, the unemployed and First Nations people. In The End of the Picnic (1953), he attempted to envisage Captain Cook’s arrival through Indigenous eyes, possibly based on discussions he’d had with First Nations people at the La Perouse Mission on Dharawal Country.

In the poem, Cook’s appearance is not an act of divine providence, as Webb had elsewhere been taught, but rather a “blasphemy” against pre-colonial sacredness; the longboat rowing to shore becomes “the devil’s totem”.

After another stint in England, Webb flew back to Australia in 1960. He had been institutionalised in Birmingham and Norwich with “persecution mania”. He was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia not long after his return. He was institutionalised in multiple hospitals in Sydney, Orange and Melbourne through the 1960s, writing a long sequence, Ward Two, about his time in Parramatta Mental Hospital, now Cumberland Hospital.

Three collections followed: Socrates and Other Poems (1961), The Ghost of the Cock (1964) and Collected Poems (1969). These three books stunned not only poets of his own generation, like Judith Wright and A.D. Hope, but the emerging generation of Gwen Harwood, Bruce Beaver and Robert Adamson.

Webb died in 1973 at age 48 from a coronary occlusion, likely hastened by psychiatric drugs and heavy smoking. In an obituary for the Sydney Morning Herald, Les Murray wrote: “Frank Webb’s verse has been the gold standard by which complex poetic language has been judged […] a master of last lines, of last stanzas and final phrases.”

Just two years later, poet James McAuley in A Map of Australian Verse provided a more suspicious counter-narrative, whereby Webb was “a psychotic who lived his life in mental hospitals” and squandered his obvious talent.

Robert Adamson, who met and wrote nine poems about Webb, recalled at the 2012 Sydney Writers’ Festival that he had once heard Clive James refer to Webb (possibly sardonically) as “the maddie”, something Adamson found “just so disrespectful”.

Universal humanity

Webb was not Australia’s first poet to be institutionalised. Henry Kendall and Anna Wickham precede him. But he became famous for the second time as Australia’s inaugural “mad poet”.

In life and death, Webb paid a price for this. He became a cautionary tale of a young prodigy, whose increasing density on the page was surely the product of a suspect mind, and nothing to do with his deep reverence for complex poets like Gerard Manley Hopkins, T.S. Eliot, Hart Crane, Robert Lowell, Dylan Thomas and Judith Wright.

Webb arguably also paid the price for being what he called “a devout but not puritanical Catholic”, who turned his back on the secular, brawny nationalism (and outright racism) of the Bulletin to preach a universal humanity. Social justice is a key theme in his work and he wrote devotional poems centred around Gospel scenes or saints like St Francis, St Therese of Lisieux and St Maria Goretti.

Webb’s Collected Poems runs to 360 pages, plus 30-odd pages of commentary and notes. His legacy, properly understood, cannot be considered less than that of a giant.

The renowned English critic Sir Herbert Read was one of the first international voices to recognise this. In the 1960s, Read declared Webb “one of the greatest poets of our time” and “the most unjustly neglected poet of this century”. He compared Webb’s achievement to that of Rainer Maria Rilke, T.S. Eliot, Boris Pasternak and Robert Lowell.

While it is rare to find a schoolboy or girl (poor devils) who knows the name Francis Webb, he nonetheless appears in almost every major Australian poetry anthology since 1945.

His name also crops up in some unexpected places, for example in Gail Jones’ novel The Death of Noah Glass, or carved into stone in the Civil Square in Orange. There is a proposal to add his name to a history wall at the future Westmead Hospital Mental Health Unit.

Good and evil in the balance

Webb’s relevance endures as a protest poet, particularly about the loss of innocence at a time of war. His teenage innocence was interrupted by the second world war, and his maturity by the Cold War. His message in defence of children in war-zones remains universal.

In Webb’s masterpiece Ephpheta (1964), composed around the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, children are not only the hope for the future in a nuclear-armed world, but they also represent our newborn state of sacred innocence.

Ephpheta means “be opened”. The word is used by Christ (Mark 7:31) to heal those deprived of their senses.

I love Ephpheta for its scope and its drama, with the battle between good and evil firmly in the balance. This is different to earlier poems, such as Five Days Old (1961), where Webb holds a baby who reminds him of the incarnated Christ, before whom

In the sleeping, weeping weather
We shall all kneel down together.

In the years before his death, the National Library of Australia and University of Queensland Press recorded Webb reading nine poems spanning his career, from Morgan’s Country (1953) to St Therese and the Child (1969).

To hear Webb read Ephpheta is to experience a stunning moment in Australian literature, one that serves as both warning and consolation for our present version of mechanised inhumanity, helmed by artificial intelligence, drones and post-truth algorithms.

He introduces his performance (c.1970) thus:

This is Francis Webb. I would like to read you a short poem which I have just written lately called Ephpheta. It tries to say something about the New Testament story of Jesus, who healed the dumb and deaf man … I make him blind as well. I try to say something about creation, the world of senses, and perhaps a little about the dangers of our own time.

Ephpheta

(For a child born in the Cold War)

Deaf, and dumb, and blind.
The personal being and darkness converging in a tide
Of touch – warm, cold, smooth, coarse – and ruminant
Whilst deploying from encampment upon servile jubilant sand
And shapeless littoral that yet sleeps within her side.
So blooms the huge gaseous pain unilluminant,
So darkness busies herself: trireme of her breathing
Is supple valley for my face, two polar cabins for my lips;
Come hands, fingers – the laden bodiless ships
And merchandise of nakedness and clothing.

Into sleep the reveille of my veins
And martial drumming dark of heartbeat, motion:
Dedicated shoulders jostle gently about my moving
– For we are of darkness: as psalmody of rains
Upon the forehead, our footsteps toward ocean
Which drinks and renders our dumb blind vintage of loving.
Shall this be shingle of sleep? – but apart
From sleep this moment heavy with hands and myrrh:
We breathe, are weighed and pondered by oceans astir:
Dark light dark sings all my tiny heart.

Oceans groaning, groaning out of night …
Ephpheta … blaze home of a sudden these vandals of the will.
Touch? Being? Only these burning cavernous ones;
But warheads of butterflies in the strafing light;
Schizophrenic atom of the sun; and upon the hill
An armour-plated coney trains his guns;
And gnarled railway-hovels, one eye winking, wait
Bombardment; and Galilee of mud walls and rocks;
Or grey-green bridges, muzzled rivers, clocks;
While the honeycomb bares his teeth upon my plate.

Ephpheta is late-career Webb at his best: complex, winding, powerfully symphonic.

New Testament wisdom is applied as a salve to Cold War imagery of a nuclear explosion (“schizophrenic atom of the sun”), the reveille music of bugle or drum that is used to wake military personnel, and the “conehead” or “coney” aircraft targeting nearby hills.

What hope is there for innocence in such ruthless times? The final line discovers bared teeth in the honeycomb, a biblical symbol for the sweetness and richness of God. Even this feels corrupted by a world seemingly deaf, dumb and blind to wanton destruction.

And yet there remains a flicker of hope. Even in the darkness of the “trireme”, the ancient warship, there are dreams, healing and love – even if “dark light dark sings all my tiny heart”.

As Webb counsels in Five Days Old, the more hopeful twin to this poem,

The tiny, not the immense,

Will teach our groping eyes.

Your favourite poet’s favourite poet

In 2025, I edited and released a different collection of Webb’s poetry. With permission from Webb’s family, the National Library and University of Queensland Press, I combined the audio of Webb reading his poetry with synchronised dynamic text in a 24-minute YouTube video produced by the Macquarie University Digital Lab.

Now anyone can type “Francis Webb Reads” into YouTube and hear why Webb remains, as Alice Allan of the Poetry Says podcast put it, “your favourite poet’s favourite poet”.

Being so far ahead of his time has preserved Webb’s appeal. I saw this when my edited edition of his Collected Poems was launched at Sydney, Perth and Melbourne Writers’ Festivals in 2012. I’ve seen it at the annual Francis Webb Reading, now in its 14th year and part of Australian Poetry Month curated by the Red Room.

I’ve also seen it teaching Webb at Macquarie University, where students revere the courage of the first Australian poet to openly discuss mental health crises and the historical mistreatment and stigmatisation of mental patients. And I’ve seen it in the intergenerational reaction to the podcasts, readings, radio interviews and articles I produced for the 2025 centenary of his birth.

It’s high time for Webb to reach a wider readership. He is still Australian poetry’s best kept secret. But those who encounter him rarely forget him, especially once they’ve had what I call “the Francis Webb moment” when you discover a line or stanza that makes you gape with wonder and ask yourself: Woah, who the hell is this guy?

Ephpheta is reproduced with permission from the estate of Francis Webb.

Toby Davidson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.