God's Fool: The Life and Poetry of Francis Webb

This is the story of one of Australia’s greatest twentieth century poets who spent nearly his whole adult life in mental hospitals labeled a schizophrenic. He was hailed by the eminent British critic Sir Herbert Read as “the most unjustly neglected poet of the twentieth century” and was compared by Herbert Read to Rilke, Pasternak, Eliot and Robert Lowell. Webb’s life story, which covers time in Australia, England and Canada, is an amazing saga of the transformation of massive personal difficulties into a rich creative outcome. In the words of one of his own characters, The Knight, in The Canticle a poem about the life of St Francis of Assisi: “All beauty, all joy? Yes, - and all pain and disfigurement.” Webb’s poetry covers a huge range of subjects from sagas of Australian exploration, to poems of spiritual engagement and insightful studies of fellow inmates in mental hospital. He writes of the landscape and history of Australia, England and Canada where he trained as an air-gunner at the end of the Second World War. His language – powerfully challenging and breathtakingly beautiful- takes the reader deep into an understanding of the nature of human existence. Webb was born on the 8th February1925 and died on the 23rd November 1973.