Vale Bruce Beaver (1928-2004).(Literature)(Obituary)

BRUCE BEAVER, whose funeral took place at the Northern Suburbs Crematorium on February 24, was not only one of Australia's most valued contemporary poets but one of its most inspirational.

In the heady days of the "poetry wars", particularly in Sydney, it was Bruce Beaver who acted as a mentor to key figures on both sides and helped many young poets be less dogmatic than they might otherwise have been. Those who thought of themselves as "avant garde" were impressed by his extensive knowledge of the American poetry of the 1950s and 1960s. Those who were labelled "conservative" recognised him as someone who understood the importance of craft and had a strong sense of the whole poetic tradition (which hadn't necessarily started with the Beats or the New Yorkers).

Bruce Beaver, in the smaller Australian poetry scene, had a comparable importance to that of Ezra Pound in early twentieth-century modernism. Pound, relatively selflessly, did what he could to promote the careers of radically different American poets such as Robert Frost and T.S. Eliot. He was also a great friend of William Carlos Williams whom Eliot, in turn, disdained. While it is probably still invidious in the Australian context to name names we can be certain that younger Australian poets who looked to Kenneth Slessor as a model were as much helped by Beaver as those who looked to John Ashbery or Frank O'Hara. Beaver realised that all these poets were part of the same "broad church" and that aesthetic dogmatism, of whatever variety (let alone personal enmity), was counterproductive to the health of poetry in this country.

Such influence was achieved not only through sheer academic knowledge of the tradition (autodidactically acquired) but through the low-key force of his personality. Bruce Beaver wrote of himself as "a moderate talent among other talents" and was always interested in what those "other talents" were doing, whether or not they were older or younger. There was never the slightest dismissal of the young just because they were young and therefore relatively inexperienced in both life and the art. Several of the generation just before Beaver's were also helpful but not in the same outgoing and broadminded way he was. They tended ...