"...a city lover, fastidious and excessively courteous, in those qualities resembles Baudelaire, as he does in being incapable of sentimentalizing over vegetation, in finding in nature something cruel, something bordering on effrontery. He prefers chiselled stone to the disorganization of grass".

Poetry Collections

• Thief of the Moon, Sydney: Hand press of J. T. Kirtley (1924)
• Earth-Visitors, London: Fanfrolico Press (1926)
• Trio: a book of poems, with Harley Matthews and Colin Simpson, Sydney: Sunnybrook Press (1931)
• Cuckooz Contrey, Sydney: Frank Johnson (1932)
• Darlinghurst Nights: and Morning glories: being 47 strange sights, Sydney (1933)
• Funny Farmyard: Nursery Rhymes and Painting Book, with drawings by Sydney Miller, Sydney: Frank Johnson (1933)
• Five Bells: XX Poems, Sydney: F.C. Johnson (1939)
• One Hundred Poems, 1919-1939, Sydney: Angus and Robertson (1944)
• "Beach Burial" 1944
• "The Night Ride" -Kenneth Slessor
• "Sleep"
• "Out of Time" 1930

Essays/Prose

• Bread and Wine, Sydney, Angus and Robertson (1970)

Edited

• Australian Poetry (1945)
• The Penguin Book of Modern Australian Verse (Melbourne, 1961)

• Slessor has a street in the Canberra suburb of McKellar named after him.
• The bells motif in "Five Bells" is cleverly referenced at the end of the 1999 song "You Gotta Love This City" by The Whitlams, which also involves a drowning death in Sydney Harbour.