Dr Christopher Pollnitz

Biography

Since retirement in 2010, Christopher Pollnitz’s focus has swung towards research in and publication on D. H. Lawrence.  The first two volumes of The Poems, for the Cambridge University Press edition of D. H. Lawrence’s Works, appeared in 2013.  The third and last volume of The Poems: Uncollected Poems and Early Versions was published in 2018.  Volume III was also the fortieth and final volume in the Cambridge University Press edition of D. H. Lawrence’s Works.

Since publication of The Poems, Pollnitz has continued to produce chapters, articles and reviews on Lawrence – for instance, “D. H. Lawrence: Croydon Poet” in 2020 – but has focussed on Lawrence in Australia.  An article on the photographs which Denis Forrester took of Frieda and Lawrence in Thirroul – drawing on the album of the Forresters’ granddaughter, Beverley MacKay, who lives in the Nelson Bay area, and on materials deposited by the Forresters’ son, Norman Forrester, in the Local History section of the Newcastle Public Library – was published in 2021.  A second article, “Sidney Nolan and Arthur Boyd: Lawrence’s Afterlife among Australian Painters”, will be published late in 2022.

In the last five years, Dr Pollnitz has received two honours, from the UK and the USA.  In 2017, he was elected a Vice President of the D. H. Lawrence Society.  In 2020, the Harry T. Moore Award for Lifetime Achievement in Lawrence Studies was conferred on him.  Because of the pandemic, the award was presented at the 15th International D. H. Lawrence Society of North America Conference, convened in Taos, New Mexico, 19-23 July 2022.

Research Expertise

Prior to his retirement, Dr Pollnitz's interests included contemporary Australian literature, particularly poetry, which he wrote about in chapters, articles and reviews.  These ranged over a number of later twentieth-century Australian poets, notably Peter Porter, Les Murray, John Scott and Alan Wearne.  Included among the articles, in 2004, was the first survey to be written of the Australian verse novel, an article which has attracted others to the study of what is now a well recognised genre.  In 2020, Linda Weste edited a collection of interviews, Inside the Verse Novel: Writers on Writing, and in 2022 a monograph, The Verse Novel: Australia and New Zealand.  In 2021, ANU’s National Centre for Australian Children’s Literature published a blog by a teacher librarian, “Momo”, on verse novels for young adults.

Published in 1982, Pollnitz’s first article on Lawrence, “‘I Didn’t Know His God’: The Epistemology of D. H. Lawrence’s ‘Fish’”, led to his being invited to a centenary conference in Bristol.  In 1985, the paper he gave at the centenary conference in Bristol, “‘Raptus Virginis’: The Dark God in the Poetry of D. H. Lawrence” – it was published in 1986, in D. H. Lawrence: Centenary Essays, edited by Mara Kalnins – led to an invitation to join the international team of editors working on the Cambridge University Press edition of Lawrence’s Works. Pollnitz’s chapters and articles on Lawrence include a series, beginning in 1995, on Lawrence’s manuscript verse, the transmission of the texts of Lawrence's poems and the problems of editing his poetry for the Cambridge University Press edition of Works.

Teaching Expertise

Pollnitz taught undergraduate courses in English literature from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries.  His specialist periods were English Romanticism and Modernism. He coordinated and taught courses on creative writing, never believing himself to be a sufficiently accomplished poet to teach such courses appropriately.  A course he taught with more conviction, Poetry in Action, was designed to encourage trainee primary and secondary teachers to overcome their fear (engendered by equally frightened secondary teachers) of poetry.  The course encouraged student teachers to use poetry often in the classroom, to read it aloud and to convince school students that poetry is immense fun.  In Romanticism and Poetry in Action he sang ballads like “The Cruel Mother” and “Lord Randall”, relating them to Wordworth’s “The Thorn” and Bob Dylan’s “A Hard Rain”.  Singing, even with an untrained voice, is a first-rate attention grabber in lectures or seminars.  Reciting poems from memory comes a close second.  Another course he designed and enjoyed teaching, Hardy to Lawrence, looked at the issue of Victorian and twentieth-century censorship.  A course he devised but taught only twice, Poet Novelists and the Verse Novel, was taken by Judy Johnson, who has gone on to write the verse novel, Jack (2006 and 2008), and to establish herself as the finest twentieth-century poet in the Hunter region.

Georgina Woods, a former postgraduate student whose PhD on Ezra Pound was co-supervised by Pollnitz, has recently published a volume of poems, The Tide Will Take It (Puncher and Wattmann, 2021).  Two other postgraduate students with whom Pollnitz had a mutually beneficial relationship were Elizabeth Easton and Ronan McGinty.  Dr Easton has extracted from her thesis on Hardy’s tragic novels an article on ‘Keeping Secrets’ in Far from the Madding Crowd; the article has recently been published in the Thomas Hardy Journal.  In his thesis Dr McGinty searched for contemporary, hitherto unlisted reviews of Lawrence’s poetry and added more than ten per cent to the number of previously known reviews; the reviews he discovered have now been recorded and discussed in the reception sections of The Poems.  Since himself becoming an Honorary Associate of the University of Newcastle, Dr McGinty has continued to work in with Pollnitz on all his Lawrence projects.

Administrative Expertise
I have served as head of the discipline of English and convenor of the Honours English program, but my preference is for coordinating of undergraduate courses.