Philip Martin: 23 March 1931–18 October 2005
For more than 50 years Philip Martin has been an essential part of my life and imagination. Notwithstanding a distance of sometimes thousands of miles, his companionship has been one of my constant reference points, and not only in literary matters. Philip had the essential gift of friendship, which is much rarer than we usually think. It goes well beyond, though it includes, camaraderie and mateship. Philip could scan a difficult situation (as well as a poem) with great deftness. He could listen, hold still, empathise, keep his counsel then, if it were needed, give it with a candour and clarity that were often disarming and nearly always liberating. In other words, his friendship was one that paid attention and did not flinch.
Thoroughly Australian in that he felt completely at home in Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra, Philip was a true cosmopolitan. He had a strong pulse of affinity with Italy, Eastern Europe—particularly Hungary—and most especially with Renaissance England. His knowledge of Elizabethan poetry was astonishing in its range and accuracy. He knew by heart hundreds of lines of Spenser, Donne, Shakespeare and many others, and he found occasions to quote them, quite naturally, when they were relevant to what was happening right now. Yeats, too, and A. D. Hope and David Campbell and Bruce Dawe. He also had an almost encyclopaedic knowledge of classical music which he carried lightly, without the slightest fuss or pretension.
Besides his own four volumes of poems, Philip also made some fine translations of a selection of poems from the Swedish of Lars Gustafson, and his book-length study of Shakespeare’s sonnets Self, Love and Art is one of the best introductions to the sonnets that one could wish for. To pick it up and read it now has a most salutary effect. It rises out of the desert of techno-critical jabber of modern criticism and sounds like a human being speaking to us without the least condescension about some of the important things Philip found in the poems. I regard it as a rare treasure.
All of us who were touched by Philip’s companionship, his wide-ranging talk, his hilarious and affectionate mimicry of colleagues and teachers, and his quick generosity are at a loss. We find ourselves walking about in an emptiness where Philip used to be. If we are sustained somewhat in this bleakness it is