Songs of a Sentimental Bloke
A larrikin falls in love, marries, loses a baby and keeps talking. C. J. Dennis wrote the poems in a invented working-class dialect that was meant to be read aloud, and the book sold out repeatedly during the First World War.
The dialect can look like mockery on the page, but the poems are on the side of the speaker: his affection, his grief and his awkwardness are all treated seriously. It is a rare thing in Australian writing of the period, a working-class voice given lyric form without being cleaned up. Read it aloud.
Public-domain status
First published in 1915. In the United States, works published before 1930 are in the public domain. In the European Union the general term is the life of the author plus 70 years; C. J. Dennis died in 1938, so this work has been free to republish there since 2009.
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