Michael Dransfield

Australian poet

Michael Dransfield (12 September 1948 – 20 April 1973) was an Australian poet active in the 1960s and early 1970s who wrote close to 1,000 poems. He has been described as "one of the most widely read poets of his generation."

Dransfield was born in Sydney, and educated at Sydney Grammar School. He briefly studied English literature and language at the University of New South Wales and the University of Sydney before dropping out. He worked for some months as a clerk at the Australian Taxation Office before drifting into the counter culture. From then on he worked intermittently, living mainly in Paddington, Balmain, "personal identity, the family, the relationship between human beings and the natural world, poetry itself, and states of mind" infection related to drug use and a report that the coroner's finding on the cause of death was "acute broncho pneumonia and brain damage".

Rodney Hall, who as poetry editor of The Australian newspaper had been among the first to publish Dransfield's poetry, edited and posthumously published several collections of Dransfield's poetry during the late 1970s and early 1980s, including Collected Poems (UQP, 1987). In 2011 a poet character called "Michael" (evidently based on Dransfield) was featured in the second part of the ABC telemovie Paper Giants: The Birth of Cleo. Several of Dransfield's poems were set to music by Paul Stanhope for mixed choir as Three Geography Songs in 1997. Other composers who have set his texts include Ross Edwards, Simon Reade, Paul Antoni Bonetti, and Dan Walker.