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Editor's note: Barry Spurr, Literary Editor, writes: Professor Gerald Alfred Wilkes, Foundation Professor of Australian Literature and Challis Professor of English Literature at the University of Sydney, died on May 15, 2020, aged ninety-two. He is deeply mourned and remembered with profound gratitude by many as a champion of the discipline of English and the traditional values of the university as a centre of freedom of thought and expression.
'This is a comprehensive, informative and reflective account of the life of the poet David Campbell. Campbell lived from 1915 to 1979 and the more than forty years since his death have not diminished the power and vision of his poems nor the value in continuing to read works of superlative craftsmanship; his eye for the natural world in its polarities; and the intellectual inquiry expressed in his verse. Persse’s book encouraged me to re-assemble my copies of Campbell’s poems and explore something more of their scope and what others have said about him. That kind of response may be the aim of the Life—to encourage reading and re-reading of the poems as the primary point of interest and encounter with the man who wrote them.' (Introduction)
