THE POETRY OF AUSTRALIA.

Otago Witness, Issue 2761, 13 February 1907, Page 79

THE POETRY OF AUSTRALIA.

•-'An Augury of Greater Things to Come. — *' Everyone who cares for our literature, everyone who has hope of its (future, will - turn eyes of interest to the poetic effort of our race beyond the seas. Will the splendour of England's poetry be renewed in those younger offshoots <of her blood ? Assuredly the great 'Australian or the great Canadian poet yr]il be hailed and honoured here when be krrives. As yet he has not arrived." Sl{ these words the writer of a valuable

article in the Times Literary Supplement (December 7) expresses public opinion very fairly. The writer has before him the following four books :—: — "An Anthology of Australian Verse.'' edited by Bertram Stevens (Maemillan) ; "A Southern Garland" (Sydney: Bulletin office); "Odes and Lyrics," by John Bernard O'Hara (Melbourne : Melville and Mullen); and "The Silent Land and other Verses," by Bernard O'Dowd (Melbourne : T. C. Lothian). The Times reviewer is tempted to theorise. " Even North America." he says, " with the intense national life of the United States and a far longer and fuller history, has not produced the poets we should have expected. Is the soil of a new continent uncongenial ? It may be. In the case of Australia there are many reasons that seem plausible. Except for a few chosen scenes it is not a beautiful country. But a child seldom considers looks in its mother ; and a country needs not beauty to be loved and to be sung with passionate affection. A poet, moreover, will find beauty everywhere. Again. Australia has no history to speak of — or, let us say, to sing of. She has not had to face peril from without ; no invader has driven home to her the consciousness of her national existence. This is a defect of experience that Australian poets feel themselves — We boast no more of our bloodless flag, that

rcsa from a nation's slime; Bettsr a ehred of a deep-<?yed rag from the

storms of the o!den time. From grancbr clouds in our "peaceful skies" lhan ever were tbere before: I teH jou the Star of the South shall rise — in the lurid clouds of war. So sings Mr Henry Lawson ; and echoes of the same cry are to be found elsewhere in this collection. Certainly stirring events affect and stimulate imaginative minds. And yet men commonly overrate the influence of events on poetry. Events do not produce great poets ; that is certain. They produce a movement in the mental atmostphere of a time which may or may not be favourable to poetry ; in any case, the influence is indirect. Rarely, indeed, do contemporary events inspire" anything but mediocre verse ; though the natural desire that poets should find their subjects in such material is always prompting the less intelligent critics to demand it of them. No, it is the legendary rather than the historical that has always proved the most congenial field for imaginative minds ; the borderland where history melts into fable and heroic figures appear dimly, like a statue only half -disengaged from the marble, waiting for the creative hand to give them character and life. So. in a new continent, there is always a certain temptation with poets to hark back to the aboriginal mysteries of the land. But the gap between new and old is too vast ; legends of the Maori or of the Indians of the West can but be toyed with ; the poet remains outside them.

After all. the singers of oversea are of our race ; and it is the race, not the continent, that counts. In "Mr SLevens's anthology are many touches of pathetic feeling that show how near is England to the heart of the Australian and New Zealander. And yet the life is new, everything is different ; and one would, feel it a limitation, a stunting and unnatural choice, in a poet of the southern seas to sing merely of the same subjects as his brethren in Europe. Poetry is of its essence a universal thing ; whatever changes, the springs of human joy and suffering do not change. But we like to find in a poem, as in all woiks of art, the savour of its origin ; we want it to be racy of the soil it sprang from. Whitman, with all his defects and absuidities, gives the sense of a fresh continent and the life of a restless race engaged in subduing it. The poets of Australia have not shown this power as yet. We receive from their pages vivid impressions of climate, of the terrible droughts and sudden floods peculiar to the country ; and the invasion of human life by elemental powers has always been an enduring theme in poetry. - But we do not get the large horizon of Whitman, in which the contending forces of man and nature are merged into a profounder vision of the universe.

" What is lacking to Australia even more than a great poet is a great poem. For such an achievement enlarges the sense of human power; it emanates light and energy ; it creates a glow which kindles scattered sparks of inspiration, in this mind and in that, into coherence. When the man is greater than his work we are left with a sense of human failure tinging the sense of glory. In a new continent, perhaps, such as Australasia, the great poem will not come until circumstances have changed, and what was provincial has become central. But the coming of genius obeys no laws we know of. If our practical English race had produced no poetry all our critics would have cried, How should it? and would have discovered a hundred reasons for our incapacity. The remarkable fact remains that our race has surpassed all other modern nations in the greatest and most articulate of the arts. This gives us hope for the future, not only here, but beyond the oceans. And whatever precise value we may set on the poetry of Australia, it is a vigorous growth of which its country is proud. As we might expect, it is almost

entirely lyrical. . . . The contemporary English models have not been fortunate for Australians, at least on the technical side." After noting the influence of Swinburne and Tennyson on the work of Gordon and Kendall, the reviewer commends the unmannered simplicity of Mr Roderic Quinn's " House of the Commonwealth." Mr Quinn, says the reviewer, is a true lyrist, with a rich fancy, and still a young man. Mr J. B. O'Hara has, like Mr Quinn and others, written an ode for the new Commonwealth ; and it is noticeable how, in his case too, the

greater theme has called forth a larger and a firmer style, though not less charged with feeling than ' the more personal lyrics. There is much descriptive verse" in Mr O'Hara's volume, but. though fluent and coloured, it lacks distinction. . . . Australian verse h?s found, perhaps, its -most characteristic successes in poems like' Mr Edward Dyson's ' Old Whim Horse,' • -which is of" the same general type as Gordon's ' Sick Stock-Rider ' ; it has the great merit of rounded completeness. But the most arresting work of the younger generation is that of Mr Bernard O'Dowd. Here we have a poet who means intensely what he says. Using almost exclusively a tersely-moulded four-line stanza, he makes of this an instrument of contained but ' burning emotion. Acutely and even bitterly conscious of the cankers and monstrous overgrowths of latter-day ' civilisation.' he utters the cry of his wounded but passionate faithThai man is God however iovv — Is man, howaver h;gh. Mr O'Dowd is too monotonous ; his very intensity hinders him from large and genial conceptions; and, like his comrades, he suffers from an occasional taint of iournalistic diction. But the idealism which he shares with Mr Quinn and Mr Farrell — we should have liked to quote some stanzas from the latter's sincere and stirring ' Australia to England ' — is proof that the ancient instinct of our race for poetry lives and is strong beyond the seas, a precious leaven of empire. We welcome what these poets send us, an augury of greater things to come."