Clarence James Dennis

Clarence Michael James Stanislaus Dennis, 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.