In the days when the world was wide: poetical works of Henry Lawson. Henry Lawson. 1970.

The great strength of Henry Lawson’s poetry lies in his wonderful ability to tell a story, and to translate real experiences, the evidence of his own eyes and ears, into the ‘simple ringing verse’ which was to bring him much acclaim.

There is in Lawson’s work, both in his verse and in his short stories, a vital and disarming honesty - whether he is describing the crowds thronging the streets of Sydney, the ‘traditional mateship’ of the Australian bush, or the harsh life of a swagman, trudging the parched tracks of the inland plains.

The sincerity is manifest in Lawson’s ‘poems of revolt’, in which he is able to express an active, sometimes explosive indignation at man’s inhumanity and human suffering wherever they are to be found. He is the ultra-democrat, the reformer, the revolutionary, speaking with a voice that was, and is still today, instantly recognisable as that of a man passionately concerned with the quality of life.