David Campbell published a dozen volumes of poetry between 1949 and his death in 1979, as well as joint selections of Russian translations, collections of short stories and anthologies. Perhaps the purest lyricist of his time, he remained faithful to the few literary forms – the ballad, the song, the sonnet – that first engaged his attention, and never tried to force his range beyond its limits. There was no verse novel, no historical narrative, no extended satires or epistles. But he was not unresponsive to the debates that enlivened Australian literary discussion during his lifetime: A.D. Hope’s advocacy of the discursive mode finds its influence on one phase of his work, as does a highly individual use of neoclassical references. His short poems explore the whole range of Australian history from a variety of angles and, for all their brief and fragmentary forms, build up a narrative that is just as impressive as some of the more popular sequences of the 1940s. In the 300 pages of his Collected Poems (1989), not many go over the page. His poems might seem small in scale, but his collected work has a greater impact than that of many of his more ambitious, heavyweight contemporaries.