When we read the few poems Slessor has preserved from the ['twenties], certainly two conflicting impressions are left with us; the first of a … lustiness and decorative excess where image jostles image and texture is crusted with over-richness; but the second, which seems, as the poems succeed each other, to move nearer and nearer into the foreground, is an emptiness that underlies these feverish sensuosities, a lack of inner solidity, a perception of the abyss that increases gradually into terror.

It seems that in Slessor's poetry two conflicting forces meet—the Nietzchean cry that man must learn to suffice himself, must increase his capacities, must become physically and spiritually superior to himself; and the Nietzschean perception which underlay that demand, that when God is 'dead' nothing can protect man from the malice of the universe. (p. 140)

[In an address in 1931, Slessor] acknowledged his debt to Wilfred Owen and...