The Master and the Mask: Francis Webb’s Verse Biography

Upon his death in 1973, Francis Webb was eulogized by a young Les Murray as “a master of last lines, of last stanzas and final phrases.” Shortly after his first collection, A Drum for Ben Boyd (1948), Webb experienced his first bouts of mental illness which, while limiting his freedom, also led to a series of extraordinary verse biographies of the saintly, the tyrannical, the artistic and the institutionalized which few Australian poets have been able to match.