Rich and varied portrait of a great man

Abstract

Rich and varied portrait of a great man Nathanael O'Reilly Good for the Soul: John Curtin's Life with Poetry. Toby Davidson. Crawley: UWA Publishing, 2021. 452 pp. RRP A$34.99. A respected scholar, editor, and poet, Toby Davidson is the author of Christian Mysticism and Australian Poetry (Cambria Press, 2013), editor of Collected Poems: Francis Webb (UWAP, 2011), and author of two collections of poetry, Beast Language (Five Islands Press, 2012) and Four Oceans (Puncher and Wattmann, 2020). Although other poets have higher public profiles, often thanks to their social media presence and writers' festival appearances, Davidson is highly regarded within the Australian poetry community by fellow poets. Davidson is also an outstanding scholar, as his monograph, academic articles, and work as Francis Webb's posthumous editor proves, and thus he is well qualified to conduct the research project that culminated in the publication of Good for the Soul: John Curtin's Life with Poetry, a hybrid text combining biography, history, and literary criticism. In addition to Davidson's experience and skill as a scholar, editor, and poet, he is also the great-grandson of Australia's third wartime prime minister, which gives him unique access and insight into John Curtin's life and archives. At 452 pages, Davidson's book provides weighty evidence of extensive research into Curtin's life and career as a journalist and politician and, especially, his relationship with poetry, which began in childhood. Davidson draws on hundreds of sources, including letters, speeches, newspaper and magazine articles, academic and biographical studies of Curtin's life and political career, the Curtin family library, parliamentary records, Curtin's official schedule while prime minister, interviews with Curtin and his associates, and a multitude of poems that Curtin read, quoted, and paraphrased. Davidson's exhaustive research has produced an impressive, fascinating book that is a significant contribution to the fields of Australian politics, history, and literary studies. Good for the Soul: John Curtin's Life with Poetry provides new understandings of Curtin as a politician and leader and the role of poetry in Australian politics during the first half of the twentieth century. Davidson repeatedly demonstrates that Curtin engaged deeply and frequently with poetry, quoting and paraphrasing poets in articles, speeches, and conversations on a seemingly daily basis for four or five decades. Curtin's favorite poets included Dante Alighieri, Robert Browning, Dame Mary Gilmore, Adam Lindsay Gordon, Victor Hugo, Omar Khayyam, Rudyard Kipling, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Lord Byron, James Russell Lowell, John Milton, Bernard O'Dowd, William Shakespeare, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Alfred Tennyson, Walt Whitman, and William Wordsworth. Curtin reportedly memorized impressive quantities of the works of Milton, Shakespeare, and Tennyson. Davidson's book also makes one wish that we had political leaders in Australia that read and value poetry and argue that it should be a fundamental part of Australian culture, as Curtin did repeatedly. As Davidson emphasizes, Curtin insisted that "without writers, poets, thinkers, dreamers, artists and musicians, Australia 'would be but a material place, well fed, perhaps, but not happy or enduring.' More poetry, more culture, was needed, not less" (379). I cannot imagine any Australian prime minister since Gough Whitlam echoing Curtin's argument. [End Page 389] The structure of Good for the Soul is clear, logical, and effective. The book contains an introduction and fourteen chapters. The chapters are organized in chronological order, beginning with Curtin's childhood (chapter 1) and ending with his death in 1945 (chapter 12), with the exception of chapter 13, which focuses on Dame Mary Gilmore's relationship with the Curtins, and the conclusion (chapter 14). The back matter contains a brief selection of Curtin's light verse, a list of the poetry titles contained in the Curtin Family Library, extensive notes on the chapters, a general index, and an index of 244 poets referred to by Davidson. Notably absent is a works cited or bibliography, which means that readers wanting to scan Davidson's sources in search of a particular author or text are unable to do so. Rather, they must sift through 987 notes printed across forty-two pages. I have enough publishing experience to know that the absence of a works cited...