Neilson, John Shaw (1872-1942), ranks among Australia’s finest lyric poets. His literary achievements are especially notable in view of his unsophisticated background and limited experience. He had little education and spent most of his life in the bush (remote Australian countryside) working at farming or at manual labor. Later in his life, Neilson suffered from bad health and poor eyesight. Throughout his career, his poetry reflected a sense of pity and tenderness for suffering.
Neilson said that he had to keep to simple rhymes and meters that he could remember until he had the chance to dictate them or write them down. He wrote much of his poetry in simple rhymed couplets or four-line verses. He rarely wrote long poems. As a result, his poetry seems simple. But his delicate handling of language and his unusual perception of color produce effective visual patterns and a high lyrical quality.
Neilson had pronounced ideas on color. To him, green meant youth; violet, death; red, violence; and white, innocence or childhood. This use of color produces startling and, at times, amusing descriptions.
The bush inspired much of Neilson’s poetry. His works communicate his own feeling of the beauty of the landscape, rather than providing a pictorial description. Many of the poems Neilson wrote describes the plant and animal life of Australia. He was particularly fascinated by birds and trees. His most popular and representative poem is “The Orange Tree.”
Neilson was born on Feb. 22, 1872, in Penola, South Australia. He received a small pension after the appearance of his first two collections of poetry, Old Granny Sullivan (1916) and Heart of Spring (1919). His Collected Poems was published in 1934, and Unpublished Poems of Shaw Neilson was issued in 1947, after his death. Neilson died on May 12, 1942.
