Introduction

Abstract

Like all histories, this book is a writing of the present as well as the past. It is about reading as much as writing: how we read the texts of the past after a century of radical changes in writing, and of the expansion of Anglophone poetics that dealt with those changes and proposed further. These developments were largely read, rather than written, in Australia, yet in the later twentieth century there were major reimaginings of Australia’s cultural history that were “poetics by other means” (to adapt Marjorie Perloff), such as the writings of Paul Carter and Stephen Muecke. Poetry critics aware of this work include Martin Harrison (2004), who writes of the problem of our poetics’ history:

Classifying systems, largely derived from English and American critics and historians, are applied to Australian writing, as if genetic accounts and histories of evolution similar to those of British and American writing can be mapped equidistantly across the structures of connection, response and contact which form the local histories of a local art. Borrowed terms like “pastoral,” “urban,” and “landscape” for instance, may work very differently or simply may not work at all when applied to Australian poetry. (78–79)