Clarence Michael James Stanislaus Dennis (7 September 1876 – 22 June 1938), better known as C. J. Dennis, was an Australian poet and journalist known for his best-selling verse novel The Songs of a Sentimental Bloke (1915). Alongside his contemporaries and occasional collaborators Henry Lawson and Banjo Paterson, Dennis helped popularise Australian slang in literature, earning him the title "the laureate of the larrikin". He was Australia's most popular and prolific poet, selling more than 700,000 books and publishing more than 4,000 poems.
When Dennis died, Australia's then Prime Minister, Joseph Lyons, said he was destined to be remembered as the "Australian Robert Burns".
Biography
Dennis was born in Auburn, South Australia, the first of three sons to Irish-born parents James Dennis (born 1828) and his second wife Katherine "Kate" Frances (née Tobin) (1851–1890), both had emigrated to Australia in the 1860s, his father leased hotels in, successively, Auburn, Watervale, Gladstone and Laura. His mother suffered ill health, so Clarrie (as he was known) was raised initially by his great-aunts, then went away to school, Christian Brothers College, Adelaide, as a teenager.
Dennis left school at 17 and worked as a junior clerk for an Adelaide stock and station and wool-buying firm; by the age of 19 he was employed as a solicitor's clerk. It was while he was working in this job that, like banker's clerk Banjo Paterson before him, his first poem was published under the pseudonym "The Best of the Six". He went on to publish in The Worker, under his own name, and as "Den", and in The Bulletin. His collected poetry was published by Angus & Robertson.
