I lived from 1862-1893.
I was from Australia, and am in the Oceania category.
Adams was a brilliant young English writer who championed the cause of nationalism and socialism in Australia in the 1880s. Knowing his life would be unfairly brief because of tuberculosis, he burned with passion and energy, playing a significant role in shaping and reflecting Australia’s literary, social and cultural history in the years leading to Federation.
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His six most productive years (1884–1890) were spent in Australia. Quickly and enthusiastically embraced by the Australian radical press, he became highly influential as a social analyst and commentator. His poetic work participates in both the ‘bush’ writing of the Australian 1890s and the aesthetic ‘decadence’ of the English fin-de-siècle. He also wrote a number of novels.
Adams’ death was gruesome and tragic. During a massive tubercular haemorrhage at the age of 31, he shot himself in the mouth in front of, and perhaps with the help of, his devoted wife Edith.
Francis William Lauderdale Adams is the author of:
Henry.. 1884
Australian Essays (1886)
Madeline Brown's Murder (1887)
Poetical Works 1887
Songs of the Army of the Night (1888)
John Webb's End; or Strong as Death (1889; repr. Edited and introduced by Meg Tasker, 1995)
Australian Life (1892; short stories of the outback)
The Melburnians (1892)
The Australians, A Social Sketch (1893)
The Mass Of Christ 1893
A Child of the Age (1984; autobiographical)
Tiberius 1894
'Long Forster' in repr. In The Australian Short Story Before Lawson (1986; by Cecil Hadgraft)
Popular poetry
Death? is it death you give? So be it! O Death,
thou hast been long my friend, and now thy pale
13 lines, 3 comments
It is something in this darker dream demented
to have wrestled with its pleasure and its pain:
17 lines, 1 comment
He sits. Upon the kingly head doth rest
The round-balled wimple, and the heavy rings
13 lines
In night-long days, in aeons
where all Time's nights are one;
11 lines
All the heat and the glow and the hush
of the summer afternoon;
18 lines, 1 comment
SHRIEKS out of smoke, a flame of dung-straw fire
That is not quenched but hath for only fruit
27 lines
ALOLL in the warm clear water,
On her back with languorous limbs,
11 lines
NOT for the thought that burns on keen and clear,
Heat that the heat has turned from red to white,
13 lines
(Coral Sea, Australia)
I
45 lines
In a Sampan
(Min River, Fo Kien)
86 lines
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