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Phoenix senior English textual study :
"Written for the 2019-2023 NSW Year 12 English syllabus - Common Module: Texts and Human Experiences" --Publisher's website. Kenneth Slessor’s poetry career spanned 1917–1944 and the poems examined in this text highlight changes in the poet’s focus and poetic style. He was also a renowned journalist and editor of poetry anthologies. His modernist style shows a skilful use of form, language and ‘voice’ and he has been widely praised for his ‘craftsmanship’. His poems also explore reflect thematic concerns that deal with the universality of human existence and experience. His early poems celebrate the exuberance of youth and the pulse of life while his later poems tend to become darker in tone and focus. The plight of modern man is poetically represented through the dichotomy of light and darkness, youthfulness and age and an awareness of life’s transience and the certainty of death. He summed up is view of poetry in 1948; ‘I think poetry is written mostly for pleasure, by which I mean the pleasure of pain, horror, anguish and awe as well as the pleasure of beauty, music, and the act of living.’ Kenneth Slessor’s poetry career spanned 1917–1944 and the poems examined in this text highlight changes in the poet’s focus and poetic style. He was also a renowned journalist and editor of poetry anthologies. His modernist style shows a skilful use of form, language and ‘voice’ and he has been widely praised for his ‘craftsmanship’. His poems also explore reflect thematic concerns that deal with the universality of human existence and experience. His early poems celebrate the exuberance of youth and the pulse of life while his later poems tend to become darker in tone and focus. The plight of modern man is poetically represented through the dichotomy of light and darkness, youthfulness and age and an awareness of life’s transience and the certainty of death. He summed up is view of poetry in 1948; ‘I think poetry is written mostly for pleasure, by which I mean the pleasure of pain, horror, anguish and awe as well as the pleasure of beauty, music, and the act of living.’