C. J. Dennis

Clarence Michael James Stanislaus Dennis (1876–1938) was an Australian poet, born at Auburn in South Australia. He worked as a journalist and as a political secretary, and he began publishing verse in the Bulletin and other newspapers. Writing in the Australian vernacular of the Melbourne streets, he came to be called the 'Laureate of the Larrikin'.

His best-known work is The Songs of a Sentimental Bloke (1915), a verse novel in fourteen poems telling how a Melbourne larrikin, the Bloke, courts, marries and settles down with Doreen. The book was a great popular success in Australia and sold in very large numbers; a silent film was made from it in 1919. The Glugs of Gosh (1917) is a satirical fantasy in verse, and Digger Smith (1918), written during the First World War, returns to the Bloke's world with Australian soldiers at the front.

The text of all three books is given here as printed, with Dennis's phonetic spellings kept: they are part of the poems. The slang glossaries that Dennis added to the Bloke and to Digger Smith, and Henry Lawson's foreword to the Bloke, are not included.