Wolfe Seymour Fairbridge was a scientist and poet, who worked as a research officer with the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO). Many of his poems reflect his interest in science, and he frequently incorporated biological and scientific imagery into his work. Born into a literary family - his father, Kingsley Fairbridge (1885-1924) was a South African poet who moved to Australia in 1912 - he received acclaim in 1947 for his allegory 'Denial and Riposte'.
He died three years later from poliomyelitis, at the age of thirty-one. At the time of his death he was working on 'Darwin', a sonnet sequence he had intended to be a tribute from one scientist to another, but it remains unfinished. His Collected Poems was published posthumously in 1953.
