Scottish aristocrat, rebellious youth, expert horseman, club-man, MP and poet-beneath the image of rake and hell-raiser, Adam Lindsay Gordon remained a conservative, frustrated with his failure to achieve the success he had expected from life. He finished his passionate life as dramatically as he had lived it, in a mixture of glory and outrage. A flawed hero, he was acclaimed as Australia's National Poet in 1933.

Geoffrey Hutton examines this tragic and romantic character as a man, and a poet against his culture and his times and the process of his later apotheosis.

'He wrote imperfectly in Australia those poems that in England he might have made perfect.'–Oscar Wilde