Poet Vincent Buckley was born in the town in 1925 and described his impressions of growing up in Romsey in his autobiography, Cutting Green Hay. Seven of Vincent Buckley's great-grandparents were Irish, and Ireland was a strong and constant presence in the work of this Australian poet, teacher and critic. Buckley took his BA and MA from the University of Melbourne, following this with a period of study at Cambridge. He was appointed Lockie Fellow in the Department of English at Melbourne in 1958, then awarded a personal Chair in 1967. Writings     During the late 1950s and early 1960s the Department housed a remarkable number of influential poets, including Philip Martin, Evan Jones and Chris Wallace-Crabbe as well as Buckley. His period as poetry editor of the Bulletin, from 1961 to 1963, saw the publication of many new poets. His seven volumes of poetry range from the intensely personal and intimate to rumination on the past and present of Ireland and Irish politics. His critical writing includes volumes on poetry, the novelist Henry Handel Richardson, and the Campion paintings by Leonard French. Buckley was a key figure in Catholic intellectual debate of the period, a time in which the Australian Labor movement was grappling with the Cold War and the emergence of the DLP. Buckley and Frank Knopfelmacher, both on campus and through the pages of Quadrant, were influential polemicists. Buckley's autobiography, Cutting Green Hay: Friendships, Movements and Cultural Conflicts in Australia's Great Decades, published in 1983, provides a valuable insight into the 20 years following the end of World War II. He was a charismatic lecturer and few who heard his impersonation of WB Yeats's fulmination on the modernist poetry of TS Eliot would ever forget it. His essays on Slessor, Fitzgerald, Hope, Wright and McAuley remain influential. Buckley was awarded the Dublin Prize, the University's award for an outstanding contribution to art, music, literature or science in 1977 and the Christopher Brennan Award from the Fellowship of Australian Writers in 1982.