From Man Alone to Global Potentiality; The Course of Australian Poetry
It has been said that Australian poetry registered the impact of Romantic poetry only in absentia. Yet if Australia has a High Romantic poet, it is Henry Kendall. Indeed, though a generation later in time, one can see Kendall fitting into the ‘minor’ second-generation poets of English Romanticism, stretching from George Darley to Thomas Lovell Beddoes to Thomas Hood. Kendall is particularly like Darley in the mellifluousness and density of his sonic effects, as seen in ‘Narrara Creek’:
! But sadder than all is the sense of his losses
That cometh to one when a sudden age crosses
And cripples his manhood. So, stricken by fate,
I Felt older at thirty than some do at eighty.
Because I believe in the beautiful story,
The poem of Greece in the days of her glory —
That the high-seated Lord of the woods and the waters
Has peopled His world with His deified daughters —
That flowerful forests and waterways streaming
Are gracious with goddesses glowing and gleaming —
— I pray that thy singing divinity, fairer
Than wonderful women, may listen, Narrara!
The heavy rhyme, often involving the last two syllables of a line, could be excessively musical and sound-driven. But a sense of flow, of watery whispering, wafts through the poem, although it does not attempt to be ‘imitative’ of the creek in any ‘program-music’ style. Kendall wrote the poem near Gosford on the mid-New South Wales coast; the poem reflects both the presence and the absence of the local landscape: Kendall had come too late in life to experience a primal Romantic attachment, but this is also true of Wordsworth’s (second) sojourn above Tintern Abbey. Kendall’s perceptual distance from the landscape is doubled by the dislocation of European landscape norms with respect to the Australian terrain. Kendall tries to channel classical naiads and dryads of a Wordsworthian “creed outworn”, only to rebuke himself in the monitoring transcendence of an equally Wordsworthian Anglicanism. That the naiads could be, but are not, replaced by reference to indigenous spirituality is a part of the poem’s meaning. Yet he is also trying to midwife the Australian into the settled forms of English poetry; witness the way the feminine rhyme makes us sure of how to pronounce ‘Narrara’. Kendall’s rich relation to the Australian landscape and English syntax is tinged by what his contemporary, Marcus Clarke, would call ‘weird melancholy’.
Kendall’s poems are freely available on Project Gutenberg–the web has liberated their North American manifestation from the back shelves of too few libraries — and his papers are located at the Mitchell Library, included in the State Library of New South Wales in Sydney and the National Library of Australia in Canberra. The Mitchell Library, incidentally, was named after the explorer Sir Thomas Mitchell, who famously translated Luis de Camoes’s Lusiads, and in a way can be seen, given the subject of the work he translated, as an early agent in the construction of a cosmopolitan ‘Global South’.
Our next Australian poet began his distinctive work towards the end of the nineteenth century. Christopher Brennan corresponded with Mallarmé! He is not an isolated provincial, but a visionary who was recognized by the ne plus ultra of symbolism himself as a ‘poète merveilleux’:
In ‘I Am Shut Out Of Mine Own Heart’, a distance between lover and beloved replaces Kendall’s gap between observer and landscape. Yet landscape still hovers as metaphor, as the vehicle of estrangement.
I am shut out of mine own heart
because my love is far from me,
nor in the wonders have I part
that fill its hidden empery:the wildwood of adventurous thought
and lands of dawn my dream had won,
the riches out of Faery brought
are buried with our bridal sun.
And I am in a narrow place,
and all its little streets are cold,
because the absence of her face
has robb’d the sullen air of gold.
My home is in a broader day:
at times I catch it glistening
thro’ the dull gate, a flower’d play
and odour of undying spring:
the long days that I lived alone,
sweet madness of the springs I miss’d,
are shed beyond, and thro' them blown
clear laughter, and my lips are kiss’d:
— and here, from mine own joy apart,
I wait the turning of the key: —
I am shut out of mine own heart
because my love is far from me.
The poem’s sense of a voice unable to be centered or to take its bearings from its environment intensifies the consciousness of distance. ‘Intensification’ is more apt here than the more Romantic ‘internalization’. The glistening that beckons from an estranged source may image the far psalms that Kendall could not quite approach near Gosford. David Brooks of the University of Sydney is organizing a conference next summer on the inheritance of French Symbolism in Australian poetry; the curious Frenchness of the hearty-nationalist Australian 1890s might also be of interest to scholars. outside Australia.
Lesbia Harford’s poems represent Australian poetry’s most distinct lyrical voice. Passionately politically committed, Harford was an outsider not only as a woman but someone with a disability (a defective hart valve) that rendered her even more an outsider. Gender did not trump class for Harford:
Suburban Dames
All day long We sew fine muslin up for you to wear,
Muslin that women wove for you elsewhere,
A million strong.
Just like flames,
Insatiable, you eat up all our hours,
And sun and loves and talk and flowers,
Suburban dames
But her most interesting poems are when she does not quite speak in her own voice, when the displays a sideways lyricism analogous to Kendall’s and Brennan’s
Machinist Talking
I sit at my machine,
Hour long beside me Vera aged nineteen,
Babbles her sweet and innocent tale of sex.
Her boy, she hopes, will prove
Unlike his father in the act of love,
Twelve children are too many for her taste.
She looks sidelong, blue-eyed
And tells a girlish story of a bride
With the sweet licence of Arabian queens.
Her child, she says, saw light
Minute for minute, nine months from the night
The mother first lay in her lover’s arms.She says a friend of hers
Is a man’s mistress who gives jewels and furs
But will not have her soft limbs cased in stays.
The rhyme scheme here is intriguing; the first tow words of each stanza rhyme, and we look for a third, either external or internal, but the third is not there, which catches the reader short and induces a quizzical quality which makes us more attentive to how Vera is both pitiable yet curiously brave. Vera gives a sidelong glance even as she tells (presumably!) Her own story, and the speaker’s own sidewise view is an activist, empathetic redeployment of the distance from the object felt by Kendall and Brennan, a game attempt to use otherness to speak for others. Harford died of tuberculosis, perhaps one of the last writers to die from ‘the romantic disease’. But her poetry, innovative in form as well as provocative in content, is very much of the twentieth century.
Kenneth Slessor’s poetry dramatizes the entire range of Australian poetry’s engagement with high modernism. It is with Slessor and his generation that the greatest opportunities for scholars working outside Australia arise. There has been recent international interest in nineteenth-century Australian poetry, as represented by the issue of Victorian Poetry edited by Meg Tasker in 2002. Furthermore, current interpretive paradigms of Victorian poetry do not prejudge poetry for seeming derivative, overly confined by metrical forms, or resonating in local as much as global contexts. Despite the Slessor generations’ manifest if not exclusive engagement with Modernist influences, the academic conversation about Modernist poetry does not include Slessor’s work or those of his Australian peers. ‘Cannibal Street’ shows what studying Slessor might contribute:
Cannibal Street
by Kenneth Slessor
BUY, who'll buy," the pedlar sings,
"Bones of beggars, loins of kings,
Ribs of murder, haunch of hate,
And Beauty's head on a butcher's plate!"
Hook by hook, on steaming stalls,
The hero hangs, the harlot sprawls;
For Helen's flesh, in such a street,
Is only a kind of dearer meat.
"Buy, who'll buy," the pedlar begs,
"Angel-wings and lady-legs,
Tender bits and dainty parts—
Buy, who'll buy my skewered hearts?"
Buy, who'll buy? The cleavers fall,
The dead men creak, the live men call,
And I (God save me) bargained there,
Paid my pennies and ate my share.
The frank sexuality and rampant capitalism of this vernacular urbanity reminds us of Les Murray’s remark that the first metropolis depicted in Australian poetry was Hell.
Like Eliot, Slessor wrote bawdy, satiric ballads alongside his more grave and meditative verse. In ‘Cannibal Street’ one sees these two tendencies inhabiting the same poem.
Australian poetry of Slessor’s period also represents a uniquely modernist take on internationalism itself. There is a defined idea of ‘colonial writing’ in the Victorian era, and postmodernism is virtually tantamount to a robust internationalism, Modernist internationalism, though, is something very distinct. It means Beckett, Ionesco, Cioran writing in Paris, Conrad, Joyce, and Eliot writing in England, Kahlil Gibran and Garcia Lorca writing in New York. It does not mean people writing in Australia as modernists. Consider how difficult a time even as strong an indigenous ‘colonial’ modernism as Bengali modernism has had in cracking in the international modernist canon. Kazi Nazrul Islam is not exactly a household name, although he should be. Yet Australian lyric poetry in the Slessor era very much possesses a sense of ‘separate development’. This used to be attributed to residual Australian conservatism. It could be seen in a spirit of greater ‘incredulity’ towards such meta narratives. A key to what is at stake here can be unearthed by going across the Tasman to C. K. Stead’s famous essay ‘From Wystan to Carlos’ (1979). This chronicles the development in New Zealand poetry of the 1960s to 1970s from closed to open form, from British to American influence, from modernism to postmodernism. Yet Auden, the ‘Wystan’ of Stead’s title, was born in 1907, and Williams, Stead’s ‘Carlos’, was born in 1882! With regard to the snake of Antipodean poetry, the shed skin is younger than the regrown skin. This bouleversement should make us realize that the use of rhyme and meter and the thematic coherence of mid century Australian poetry was not residual but of the twentieth century, and was to some extent a conscious ‘protectionist’ resistance to the metropolitan tug of multinational modernism.
The Slessor generation thus practices a distinctly modernist sort of internationalism in, free of both the cathartic altered of Romanticism and the hyperbolic unanimity of postmodernism. Both separateness and complementarity inhabit vision of global exchange that, at its best, is neither utopian nor imperialistic.
Indeed, parochialism may not even be a particular problem in modernist Australian poetry. Indeed, parochialism may be potentially of great interpretive interest with respect to discourses of hybridity and mimicry. What might limit this era’s Australians verse is its extreme masculinity. Canonical modernist poetry as a whole has a masculinist bias. But the masculinity in Australian poetry is very different from Eliot and Pound’s scourging of what they saw as a feminized Victorian establishment. It is an isolated masculinity, epitomized by the New Zealand poet John Mulgan’s description of a similar mood in his country in his novel Man Alone. Even as the poetry of the Slessor generation registered the shock of formal and social shakeups in the modern world, they meditated deeply upon their country’s past. Indeed, they tried to invent a past for a poetic tradition to draw upon. They were preoccupied with exploration and discovery to such an extent that to know this era’s poetry is to involuntarily learn about the major European explorers of the Southern Pacific. It is as if US poetry in this era were dominated by poems about Columbus and de Soto. The colonial aspect of this proud yet immured masculinity can bye seen by comparison to the work of Ernest Buckler in Canada or Ernest Hemingway and Dashiell Hammett in the US. But there is less swagger and machismo about the Antipodean Man Alone poets. Their masculinity seems at once an inconceivable privilege and a burden to be exercised with utmost gravity, and not without guilt. Whereas Kendall and Brennan felt their colonial masculinity estranged them from their object, their modernist successors founded a sense of nationhood on this masculine isolation. Yet they could not efface an analogous sense of estrangement.
The mixture of colonial and nationalist agendas in Man Alone poetry specify a discrete place. The twinning of this locality with a specific masculinity localizes this period style in a discrete gender as much as in a discrete place. Regarding the Slessor generation in terms of gender theory would not only help in explicating the poetry but in bringing to consciousness some of the ironies of its literary isolation.
Postmodernity has made Australian poetry much more part of a comprehensive world picture. It is not just a philosophical convergence, though, that has helped engender this legibility. It has been a material convergence in the form of the Internet, and not just in the cases of younger writers such as John Kinsella, who at an early stage reached a global set of readers for his poetry via the Internet. John Tranter, the poet who has used the Web most comprehensively, is in his sixties. Even the 82 year old poet David Rowbotham has promoted his work online. The Internet has not ended what Geoffrey Blainey called ‘the tyranny of distance’. But it has made a biggest dent in its sway
To see Australian writers as not simply ‘from Australia’ but are indelibly ‘Australian’. can be a bracing restraint against the unipolar hegemony that always tugs at discourses of internationalism. Yet Australian poetry can register meaningfully on the world stage without being nationally marked. In a leader’s guide for Episcopal and Roman Catholic Sunday School teachers, I came across a mention of Peter Steele, the well-known Australian Jesuit poet. There was no mention that Steele was Australian, and this was something of a relief. Nationality should frame our encounter with the poetry, but not confine it.
Given that the most cohesive presentation of contemporary Australian poetry has been on the experimental, avant-garde side, framing Australian poets in transverse rubrics might bring more notice to poets with an explicit consciousness of the potential betrayals of language–my argument is that Australian poetry indeed has never lacked this–yet who retain a firm sense of a lyric speaker. Kevin Hart, who is, like Steele, though very differently, a religious, Roman Catholic poet, is more known in US academia as a deconstructive theorist (his major work has been on Blanchot and Derrida) than as a poet. Hart’s ‘The Gift’, one of his earliest characteristic poems, manages, with its elliptically Frostian conclusion, to register the Australian difference as both potentiality and slippage.
One day the gift arrives — outside your door,
Left on a windowsill, inside the mailbox,
Or in the hallway, far too large to lift.Your postman shrugs his shoulders, the police
Consult a statute, and the cat miaows.
No name, no signature, and no address,Only, “To you, my dearest one, my all …”
One day it all fits snugly on your lap,
Then fills the backyard like afternoon in spring.
Monday morning, and it's there at work —
Already ahead of you, or left behind
Amongst the papers, files and photographs;And were there lipstick smudges down the side
Or have they just appeared? What a headache!
And worse, people have begun to talk:“You lucky thing!” they say, or roll their eyes.
Nights find you combing the directory
(A glass of straw-coloured wine upon the desk)Still hoping to chance on a forgotten name.
Yet mornings see you happier than before —
After all, the gift has set you up for life.Impossible to tell, now, what was given
And what was not: slivers of rain on the window,
Those gold-tooled Oeuvres of Diderot on the shelf,The strawberry dreaming in a champagne flute —
Were they part of the gift or something else?
Or is the gift still coming, on its way?
Hart’s poem participates in an Australian lyricism that is no less original for not brandishing its formal innovation, a lyricism that has evoked “flowerful forests and waterways streaming” while also canvassing what the contemporary poet John Mateer has termed (speaking, suggestively enough, of Portugal) “another dominion/of pleasures unnoticed”.
© 2007
Salt Publishing Limited 
