Essays

Historically considered, there are three categories of writing, corresponding to three cultural epochs or phases of civilization—the bardic, the conventional and the truly creative. The bard is the earliest articulate man, differentiated from his fellows by nothing but that articulateness ...

Reviewed: Shakespearean Afterglow, by C.S. Montgomery (Robertson and Mullins, 1942).  Useful books of criticism are of two kinds: those that have something new to say, and those that give a rearrangement and clarification of what has already been written.  “Shakespearean Afterglow,” ...

Painting in Australia in the early part of the 20th Century was, as a whole, solely realistic. It was an art that never departed from what could be seen by the eye on the surface of nature. It transcribed nature, ...

Until recently music has been largely an imported commodity. Most of our musical life centred round the visits to this country of artists from abroad. In other words, it was imposed on, rather than growing within, the community. In order ...

THE POET: The poet needs the community, just as the community needs the poet. Neither can function properly without the other. The poet might write on a desert island, but he wouldn’t write fully nor as well as if he ...

Shepparton February 18th, 1904 Dear Mr. Stephens, Sincere thanks for all the contents of your letter. ATHENAEUM man is a heart of oak—no reed shaken by a cat's paw. And when a critic of such displacement gives me a bit ...

The next few months may decide not only whether we are to survive as a nation, but whether we deserve to survive. As yet none of our achievements prove it, at any rate in the sight of the outer world ...

We meet here to offer a tribute of gratitude and affection to the life and work of one of our most dearly loved Australians. Academic practitioners of letters concern themselves with the appraisal of Henry Lawson. It has been their ...

Literary history—a blend of biography, bibliography, philosophy, sociology, criticism, flour, soda and cream o'tartar—follows in the wake of literature as inevitably as martial history in the wake of war. Moreover it far-reachingly affects the development of letters, imbuing the impressionable ...

“Criticism Number” But the critic … Still comes with his little envious span, A hollow phrase and a measuring rod.  — Harindranath Chaltopadayah A reviewer has suggested, after perusing the first number of Meanjin Papers, that it might presage the ...

‘Poetry’s unnat’ral; no man ever talked poetry ’cept a beadle on boxin’ day, or Warren’s blackin’ or Rowland’s oil, or some o’ them low fellows; never you let yourself down to talk poetry, my boy.’ But we have disregarded Tony ...