John Le Gay Brereton

John Le Gay Brereton (2 September 1871 – 2 February 1933) was an Australian poet, critic and professor of English at the University of Sydney. He was the first president of the Fellowship of Australian Writers when it was formed in Sydney in 1928.

Brereton was born in Sydney, the fifth son of John Le Gay Brereton (1827-1886), a well-known Sydney physician who published five volumes of verse between 1857 and 1887, and his wife Mary, née Tongue. His parents had travelled on the Dover Castle from England, arriving in Melbourne on 25 July 1859 and then moved to Sydney. The younger Brereton was educated at Sydney Grammar School from 1881 and the University of Sydney where he graduated BA (1894), reading English under Professor Sir Mungo MacCallum. He was editor of Hermes, the student literary annual, and became the university's chief librarian in 1915.

Brereton had several occupations and continued his writing, in 1896 he published Perdita, A Sonnet Record, and The Song of Brotherhood and Other Verses. These were followed in 1897 by Sweetheart Mine: Lyrics of Love and Friendship and by Landlopers in (1899), mostly prose, based on a walking tour with Dowell Philip O'Reilly. The verse in Brereton's earlier volumes was pleasant but not very distinguished; however, Sea and Sky (1908) contained stronger work. In 1909 his volume Elizabethan Drama Notes and Studies proclaimed him a scholar of unusual ability and knowledge, and his studies in this period stimulated him to write his one-act play in blank verse To-Morrow: A Dramatic Sketch of the Character and Environment of Robert Greene. This is possibly the best Australian poetical play of its period, and has the merit belonging to comparatively few Australian plays that it is actable.

World War I led to Brereton producing a slender volume of verse published in 1919, The Burning Marl, dedicated to "All who have fought nobly". In 1921 he was appointed professor of English literature at the University of Sydney.

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