His father was a musician, Director of the North Sydney Academy of Music before moving to Adelaide where he became the owner of a piano importing business in Grenfell Street.
In 1928, Webb and his three sisters (Mavis, Claudia, and Leonie) were sent to live with their paternal grandparents, Charles and Amy Webb-Wagg, in Sydney.
[2] Webb wrote his first poems as a birthday present for his paternal grandmother when he was seven years old, under the tutelage of an aunt who died before she could see them in print.
Having finished high school, Webb considered entry into Sydney University on a scholarship, but this plan was disrupted by the Second World War.
In 1949, after a period of employment, and the termination of his engagement to a Jewish girl named Ethel (whom he had met in Canada during the war), he set off for Britain.
Angus & Robertson did not publish his work again until he had regained the full support of Douglas Stewart (editor of The Bulletin and Lindsay's friend) a few years later.
In 1964, Angus & Robertson published his fifth collection The Ghost of the Cock, then in 1969 released his well-known Collected Poems, with an unforgettable foreword by Sir Herbert Read (the eminent leading British critic in his day) that compared Webb's work on equal footing with that of major European and American poets Pasternak, Lowell, Rilke and Eliot.
one of the most unjustly neglected poets of the century," and Webb has since attracted substantial critical acclaim for his profound vision, his unique spiritual quest to discover the heart of things.