It’s easy to forget the artistic range of people who have died recently. Susie Figgis, in charge of casting the Harry Potter films (not just Daniel Radcliffe and co.) but the likes of Maggie Smith and Richard Harris, also persuaded Richard Attenborough when he was set to make Gandhi that he didn’t – as he imagined – want a white actor, he in fact wanted Ben Kingsley, who was half-Indian.

John Woodvine had a stint as a cop in Z-Cars, but he was also Banquo in the legendary Macbeth with Ian McKellen and Judi Dench. Then he and McKellen played the rogues in Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist. Woodvine had his supreme classical gig in 1987 as Falstaff in Henry IV and netted an Olivier Award as the fat knight whose heart is broken by Prince Hal.

That’s not how Betty Mackereth saw her relationship with Philip Larkin. Although she loved him, she said she was not in love with him, and their relationship did not start until she was in her fifties. She did eventually give Andrew Motion, Larkin’s biographer, the poems that were in that melancholy charmer’s letters to her.

Will the world get a full-scale biography of the great New Zealand bass Sir Donald McIntyre? There are those who treasure his 1988 performance as Hans Sachs (under Charles Mackerras’ baton) in Wagner’s The Mastersingers. He is most famous, however, for being the first Anglo-Saxon to sing Wotan in The Ring at Bayreuth and McIntyre’s performance with its rounded tone and its dramatic vibrancy – pitted against the Brunhilde of Dame Gwyneth Jones – made the Ring cycle familiar to a huge new audience because it was televised and shown in self-contained parts. Dramatically, this was Patrice Chéreau’s Ring with its dynamic intimations of the Fall of the West and its sense of a capitalist apocalypse in this Twilight of the Gods. Musically, it was the Ring of Pierre Boulez, with his speed and the cleanliness of his texture, his modernity in the face of the murk and majesty. But this Ring cycle introduced Wagner to innumerable new fans, and McIntyre’s Lord of the Gods was integral to this reinterpretation with its pace and dramatic grip.

Chris Wallace-Crabbe, who died the other week, was someone who kept the flame of Australian literature alive. He edited the anthology Six Voices, which did more than anything else to introduce the baby boomer generation to the work of Judith Wright and A.D. Hope. He ensured that anyone who wanted to do a second-year course in American literature at Melbourne University had to do Australian literature as well.

He was a man born to the social margins, to a Richmond which tilted to South Yarra, though there was not much money. You could hear the two Australias in his voice; one crisp and cultivated, the other down to earth and Australian in an unmistakably Melbourne way, using the flat vowel in ‘chance’ and ‘dance’. He went to Scotch, but he was one of those literature teachers who were aware of a world elsewhere: he almost became a metallurgist. He belonged to the group of poet-critics – led by Vincent Buckley – who defied the Leavisite dogmatism of the group of morally oriented critics who believed in the seriousness and depth of life, and whose Caesar was Sam Goldberg.

Chris – in the face of Vin’s enthusiasm for Furphy’s great shaggy-dog story – would say, ‘I sometimes think no one should have to read Such is Life a first time.’

Chris was handsome in a Dirk Bogarde-ish way and had the knack of looking 35 for decades. According to legend – in fact, Jack Hibberd – Germaine Greer (finding he was her tutor) said, ‘I’d like to wrap my genitals around your genitals.’

He knew and revered the great Australian painters and would tell stories of how John Brack would use some classics as toilet paper. He could review Manning Clark with a strong sense of his biblical reverberation and A.E. Housman-like rhetoric.

Chris was a man who could not (or not easily) dissimulate feeling, which was disconcerting. He could be very dry. When an American academic emperor declared, ‘This place is too lower middle-class,’ Chris replied, ‘We’ve had plenty of upper middle-class people and plenty of working-class people, but you’re the first lower middle-class person we’ve ever had.’

He once told me that he thought something I had written about Helen Garner’s The Children’s Bach was rather good. ‘Normally,’ he added, ‘you sound as if you’re being paid by the word.’ Morag Fraser said to him, ‘Well, of course he does, he is.’

He also had a sense of the ironies of professing literature. He was the founding head of the Australian Centre at Harvard and had a stint as its Australian Studies chair. But he retained a sense of the contradictions of professing literature. He would write pensive think pieces in which the cultural detritus of relativism made him reflect that not even the critic wanted to play second fiddle all the time.

His work (and his international stature) shimmered with irony and exhibited his mastery of light verse.

Chris Wallace-Crabbe was a man of considerable gentleness and real critical insight. He said of Gig Ryan’s debut book, Division of Anger, that it showed the first night was generally a bad night for somebody and that the poem ‘If I Had a Gun’ chopped up all the different sorts of macho men – some of them sleek and hip with Valium blue mouths – like firewood.

I did not see the moment when he broke down at the funeral of his son Ben. But I remember how he talked of him. I remember, too, when Peter Steele, that Jesuit of wit and fancy, died, Chris Wallace-Crabbe said, ‘Who’s going to laugh at my jokes now?’

Chris Wallace-Crabbe was a man who cherished Peter Porter and Seamus Heaney and took Helen Vendler’s criticism very seriously.

I was talking to him once about poetry and declared that Hopkins was the greatest Victorian poet. Chris said, ‘No, Hopkins isn’t the greatest Victorian poet; Browning is.’ And then he added, ‘I’m not denying that Hopkins is every bit as good as Rimbaud.’

Agree or disagree, the footnote shows the quality of the critic and of the man. We never appreciate these things till they’re gone. I learned from Chris Wallace-Crabbe. May the earth lie light on him.