Pymble: Angus & Robertson, 1973, 246pp.
My edition of Stewart’s Selected Poems is the 1992 reprint of the book originally published in 1973. If it is a straight reprint, as I’m sure it is (though I haven’t checked), then this will be the farthest back in time that these rereadings have ventured. And there is a reason for this. When I was beginning to get interested in Australian poetry in the mid-sixties, Douglas Stewart was one of the best-known and most admired poets. He was also, probably, the most influential poetry editor in the whole history of Australian poetry, commanding the Red Page of The Bulletin for twenty-odd years between 1939 and 1961 when The Bulletin was bought by Frank Packer’s Consolidated Press, reconfigured as a conventional weekly and Stewart, as poetry editor, was replaced by Vin Buckley. Poetry editors tend to exacerbate divisions since those they support and publish are always likely to be in their corner and those whose poems they reject are always likely to be hostile. And when these editors are poets themselves, there is always an avenue of attack that says he or she is overrated and would not get the attention he does if he didn’t enrol supporters by publishing them. Perhaps as a result of having two “Bulletin” poets on the staff of the University of Queensland – Val Vallis and David Rowbotham – I was certainly on the side of the supporters. In later life, as a teacher myself, I would happily include Stewart’s “B Flat” as one of my favourite “teaching” poems, but more of that later. Now, Stewart rarely appears in anthologies – he was entirely omitted, for example, from Tranter and Mead’s Penguin Book of Australian Poetry of 1991, from Peter Porter’s Oxford Book of Modern Australian Verse and Thomas Shapcott’s comparative Contemporary American & Australian Poetry, even though the first two of these find space for decidedly minor figures. Of course, historical anthologies of Australian poetry are not as common as they once were, but one is forced to ask the question whether or not this apparent occlusion of Douglas Stewart as a poet is an accurate judgement of the quality and value of his work. The end of the first quarter of the new century seems to be a moment when one could approach this reasonably dispassionately.
The first surprise in this Selected – to me at any rate – is the fact that twenty-four of his early poems are collected in an opening section called “Early New Zealand Poems” and taken from his first four books, Green Lions (published in New Zealand), The White Cry (published by Dent in England) and Elegy for an Airman and Sonnets to the Unknown Soldier (published during the war, in Sydney). Although they have their moments, I’ve always found these poems hard to love. They tend to be serious – solemn even – pieces often heroically working their way, not entirely successfully, through tricky, self-imposed rhyme schemes. The opening stanza of “Mending the Bridge” (puzzlingly included by Gray and Lehmann as one of the paltry four poems allowed to Stewart in their anthology Australian Poetry in the Twentieth Century) is a good example of this early stuff:
Burnished with copper light, burnished, The men are brutal: their bodies jut out square Massive as rock in the lanterns’ stormy glare Against the devastation of the dark. Now passionate, as if to gouge the stark Quarry of baleful light still deeper there, With slow gigantic chopping rhythm they hack, Beat back and crumple up and spurn the black Live night, the marsh-black sludgy air. . .
Yes, the setting is supposed to be sludgy and dark, and the verse may be deliberately reflecting this but it’s hard not to feel that it’s endemic to these forms and this kind of poetry. They are often poems which are a little unsure as to how they should frame personal experience. “Elegy for an Airman” has the kind of title that seems typical of a war poem and might derive, ultimately, from Yeats’s “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death” but the poem itself is really a rhapsodic celebration of a friendship dating back to childhood. The last of the selection, “The River”, tries to make a clear statement about the centrality of a particular place in a poet’s creative life:
. . . . . At the end of a life illusion falls away. When the city falls, oh then in that last day, river, I shall come back to you as a man to his lover, As the bird comes back when her wild blood sets the day And the first leaf breaks on the willow. Symbol or truth, Let the day disclose! But a man’s what his spirit knows; And what I have known for truth, now as in youth, Is one clear river, coming down cold from the snows.
But there’s a stagey self-consciousness about it all, a straining for effect, that might even make one doubt the genuineness of his attachment to the Waingongoro – the river which flows down from Mt Egmont and through his childhood hometown of Eltham in the west of the North Island. At any rate, it’s not a rhetoric of any great promise and it’s one that Stewart quickly abandoned.
As expressions of the self, the leap between “The River” and “The Cricket” – the first poem of Stewart’s next – and first successful – book, The Dosser in Springtime, is enormous.
I can’t get over it, I pipe and I trill, said the cricket; And if you should ask me why A full-grown insect should sit In a tiny tunnel in the ground And make a piping sound, I really have no reply; I can’t get over it. What is my song about? I leave it to you, said the cricket. I know that the elders will die But most of the eggs hatch out; I know the roots of the grass And perils that thump as they pass; I like to announce I am I, And that’s what my song’s about. . . . . . Say what you darn well like, It’s not a bad song, said the cricket. Here while the grassblades glisten Thrusting each frosty spike From the earth where we serve our term With the blind grub and the worm, I shrill and the tall stars listen, Say what you darn well like.
Published in 1948, The Dosser in Springtime is an adventurous work. It’s in a kind of literary ballad mode which, with its refrains, repeated lines, its rumpety-tump regular rhythms and perfect end-stopped lines, is a far cry from the directions that those turgid early poems moved in. It must have taken some courage to experiment in this form though there were doubtless plenty of similar ballads crossing Stewart’s desk. In an early review of a book of such ballads (though largely narrative) by Will Lawson, Stewart speaks of “the good, rough earth-bound sea of balladry” while admitting that “the ballad is seldom quite the same thing as poetry”. Part of the challenge that Stewart obviously enjoys is to register that simple, faux-folk forms need not be simple in what they have to say. His bunyip ballad finishes with a beauty and the beast image as the lowly and violent (and mythically Australian) bunyip aspires beyond his station:
. . . . . What did I do before I was born, the bunyip asks the night; I looked at myself in the water’s glass and I nearly died of fright; Condemned to haunt a pool in the bush while a thousand years go by - Yet I’ll walk on the stars like stepping-stones and I’ll climb them into the sky. A lady walks across the night And sees that mirror there; Oh, is it for herself alone The moon lets down her hair? The yabbie’s back is green for her, his claws are opeal-blue, Look for my soul, the bunyip says, for it was a jewel too. I bellowed with woe to the yabbie once, but all I said was a lie, For I’ll catch the moon by her silver hair and dance her around the sky.
The cricket has similar aspirations: he wants the stars to listen to his song. Themes like this fit well with the humble forms in which they are set because both form and content could be said to represent aspirations.
The second feature of this cricket poem involves interpretation. I read it as having what I would call an autobiographical resonance, using the word “resonance” to avoid a sense of direct allegory. I don’t think, in other words, that this is necessarily Stewart expressing his desire to achieve greatness in humble forms, as the cricket does, although it could be read that way. It’s a point I want to pursue in Stewart’s later poems where actual events (such as the building of the Bell Rock Lighthouse in the final poem of this Selected) are not simply allegorical expressions of a poet’s ideas and desires but rather, as it were, lie alongside that theme, adding complexity and depth to it. And of course, in the case of “The Cricket” there is the question of interpretation anyway. I have read it as an expression of a poet’s right to sing his own song no matter how crude it seems to others who, like critics such as myself, can “say what you darn well like”. But it might just as well be read as a condemnation of poets who write dull poetry but who like to think that the stars listen to their work – one can imagine Stewart getting plenty of poems like that in his role as poetry editor.
Balladry is at the core of Stewart’s next book, Glencoe, whose subject is the infamous massacre of the MacDonald clan in the winter of 1691 – they were late in providing a pledge of allegiance to the English crown and this offered an excuse for enemies to “teach them a lesson”. These are narrative ballads though and the structure of the whole book is designed so that individual poems reflect different parts of the narrative often from different points of view: a structure that Stewart was to approve of in poems like Slessor’s “Five Visions of Captain Cook” and Hart-Smith’s “Christopher Columbus”. But unlike those poems, those of Glencoe are literary ballads very much in the style of the great Border Ballads of the south of Scotland. It is a reminder that although Stewart seems to us a poet of Sydney, albeit one with a New Zealand heritage, he is also a Scot with a strong attachment to that land of his ancestors. As the autobiography of his youth, Springtime in Taranaki, shows, he visited Scotland to “walk in the very footsteps of my ancestors” and see the site of Culloden and “the dark glen of Glencoe”. The sequence is bookended by two poems about “bottle-nosed Jock” set after the massacre. A drunk, desperate for a drink, he has the strength to refuse a drink from one of the perpetrators, and in the last poem rejects a congratulatory drink from the barman who turns out to be from an opposing clan. Old clan hatreds run deep – “for you stole my father’s cattle” – and, although there’s a comic touch about these two poems, they also register the depth of that hatred. There is also a slew of dialect:
. . . . . “Then awa’ I’ll gang,” says bottle-nosed Jock, “And yet afore I leave Is there naebody here will buy me a drink For a wame that’s dry as a sieve?” . . .
But there’s no dialect in the second last poem which is the real climax of the sequence. It’s a piece of fine, and finely-felt writing that is built around the iconic image of horror for which the massacre is known:
Sigh, wind in the pine; River, weep as you flow; Terrible things were done Long, long ago. In daylight golden and mild After the night of Glencoe They found the hand of a child Lying upon the snow. Lopped by the sword to the ground Or torn by wolf or fox, That was the snowdrop they found Among the granite rocks. Oh, life is fierce and wild And the heart of the earth is stone, And the hand of a murdered child Will not bear thinking on. Sigh, wind in the pine, Cover it over with snow; But terrible things were done Long, long ago.
It’s possible to see Glencoe as an extension of the narrative poetry which had begun for Stewart with his immensely successful radio play, The Fire on the Snow, and thus in some way a branch line if we are thinking about him principally as a lyric or, at least, meditative poet. But I’m more inclined to see it as, like The Dosser in Springtime, part of a restless changing of styles in a search for a mode that will work for him. It might be seen as a successful experiment in appropriating a late medieval, popular style and building a narrative structure but, in the light of the books to follow, I think it remains just an experiment.
By the time we reach Sun Orchids, The Birdsville Track, Rutherford and the final section of his Collected Poems called “The Flowering Place” we are in the area of Stewart’s best work. The fact that it took him until his late thirties to get there is a reminder that although the early work can be very impressive, he was someone who moved around a lot in the world of available styles before settling on something that fitted his abilities best. Of course, if you don’t see these earlier works as experiments then you are likely to see him as a poet comfortable in a variety of styles and this raises that dangerous word “versatile” with its suggestion not only of facility but also of utility, the implication that he could turn his hand to something required by someone else and do a good job. This may be one of the sources of contemporary dissatisfaction with Stewart’s poetry, a sense that he lacks the obsessiveness which we feel should drive the true lyric poet, but one could point out that someone like Shakespeare, who wasn’t a bad poet, was eminently versatile and always ready to turn out a play in the style of one of his contemporaries but just considerably better.
These last books seem, on first reading, largely to be composed of two opposed types of poem. There are those devoted to small animals and flowers, the kind of things that a keen fisherman would notice while fly fishing on the Duckmaloi, say. The long passages of waiting while fishing would be an ideal time to observe the tiny intricacies of the surrounding world. The second poem of Sun Orchids, “The Gully”, a description of one of those small flowers which respond to a bee’s arrival by flicking pollen onto it in a triggered motion, is a good example:
If life is here how stealthily It moves in this green hall of rock Where mosses flourish soft and thick And lichens imperceptibly In wrinkled fans and circles shape A civilization cold as sleep On wall of stone and fallen tree. Only in the deep secrecy of bracken-fern and maidenhair One shaft of pink is glowing here And poised in tiny ecstasy With all life’s hunger in its look And arm outflung for the sweet shock The trigger-flower strikes the bee.
And then, at the other end of the scale, so to speak, there are the narratives of individuals who are outstanding in one way or another, a mode that can be traced back to works like The Fire on the Snow and the character of Scott. In these last books, there are poems about Auguste Piccard, Ernest Rutherford, Frank Worsley, Robert Stevenson among many others. In the past, I used to believe that these two sorts of poem served a related function: the portraits of flora and fauna were a way of nativizing Australian poetry, of fixing a plant or animal in verse so that gradually words like “tree” would connote in readers native Australian trees rather than European equivalents: snow gums rather than oaks. The narratives of outstanding men were part of a similar project and related to Stewart’s support of “voyager” poems, poems about exploration and settlement in Australia that served the function that epic had played in the past. As he says in his introduction to the collection of Voyager poems:
The epic, then, has these two requirements: it is a dramatic story, and it is a story significant to the nation. So far as I have ever been able to define to myself the use of poetry. It is, in addition to giving delight, to “sing the universe into shape”; that is, to make the facts, the dramas, the phenomena of our existence assimilable to the minds of men; and there seems to come a time in the history of nations when whatever it is that moves the production of poetry – some spirit moving in the nation and the time – demands that poets should sing the nation itself into shape. . .
At the same time there was the influence of Norman Lindsay and the fading glow of vitalism which, with its emphasis on a kind of Nietzschean creative drive, was very sympathetic to tales of endurance and achievement though, to be fair to Stewart, he always played down Lindsay’s influence on his work, saying that his many interactions with the old man of Springwood were nothing more than with a wonderful host and a good reader of whatever new poems Stewart brought along.
Revisiting these last books makes me question this “nativizing” perspective a little. What strikes me about the poems of birds, animals and plants is not so much that they are being “fixed” into the country’s psyche so much as being seen in relation to larger forces. The obsession behind them is not so much with the individual as with the weird gap between cosmos and individual. The trigger-flower grows among rocks whose time scale is of a cosmic order and whose mosses and lichens, though alive, seem unchanging. Contrasted to this is the tiny flower with its sudden strike – an expression of life in what seems a lifeless environment. This registering of the difference between life on an observable scale and life at the cosmic level runs throughout these poems. The poem chosen to begin Sun Orchids, “Nodding Greenhood”, sees the nine little examples in the moss as being analogous to the discovery of creativity, “what the hands could make / Or spirit dream out of rock” and they are to be found in “a globe of silence” where “gum-trees tower in millions”. The same could be said of “Helmit Orchid”, “a tiny colony / Set amongst all eternity / Where the great bloodwoods stand”. The issue gets a more extended and comic treatment in “Sarcochilus FitzGeraldi” where a small orchid, named after Robert G. FitzGerald’s grandfather, a surveyor, is constantly compared to the size of the human being after whom it was named:
. . . . . Who would have thought a man could shrink so small? Deputy Surveyor once of New South Wales, Now all he surveys on the edge of that wild rock-fall, In his sandstone crevice where even the sunlight pales, Is a trickle of the creek, one yard of shadowy sand Under his golden roof; small space enough For the tall man striding the mountains, urgent with love For all those rocky miles could put in his hand. Yet what’s the size of the spirit, and what’s its shape? . . .
Somehow this obsession with the larger forces of life and evolution and the contrast between the scales that they operate on seems closer to Stewart’s essential poetic self than any program of engaging with Australia’s sense of itself and its development from being “second-hand Europeans”.
His portrait poems too, have more complexity to them than being celebrations of heroic endeavour leavened occasionally by some ethical concerns. It’s true that a poem like “Rutherford” is obsessed by the issue of responsibility: the extent to which the splitting of the atom in 1917 ushers in an age of potential human destruction, and “Te Rauparaha” – the portrait of a violent chieftain – begins and ends with the question “Wicked bold deeds are remembered: why?” But there is far too much variation of tone for these to be a gallery of portraits of great Nietzschean achievers. The book Rutherford ends with the title poem but it is balanced by the book’s opening poem, “Professor Piccard”, done in a comic doggerel ballad style “celebrating” the Swiss scientist who ascended in a balloon to measure the gases in the upper atmosphere and later descended in a bathyscaphe (his own invention) to observe the sea’s lower depths.
. . . . . Yet when I think how from that deep Where life first moved and flickered His craft rose up like some great egg And hatched Professor Piccard, When I reflect how his brave stance Of perpendicularity In posture and in motion both Is man’s whole singularity, Who rose from that same depth and stood And climbs on to infinity, He seems more legendary now Than any old divinity; And up towards the stars of heaven Or down to look at Zero I leave Professor Piccard now, Our emblem and our hero.
I think it probably takes more courage to write, and lead with, a poem like this than it does to compose “Rutherford” in all its solemn elegance.
Another feature of these portraits is Stewart’s interest in meetings. The story of “Two Englishmen” is taken from Kinglake’s Eothen which describes how, halfway across the Sinai desert he came across another traveller riding towards him. In obedience to the bizarre protocols of the English class system he felt that he couldn’t speak to this man since they hadn’t been introduced. It was all highly embarrassing though, to do him justice, Kinglake knew how absurd it was to cross paths with someone in the middle of nowhere and not exchange a word. In Stewart’s poem,
. . . . . And while their Arab servants rushed together With leaps and yells to suit the glad occasion Each Englishman gazed coolly at the other And briefly touched his hat in salutation And so passed by, erect, superb, absurd, Across the desert sands without a word. But when they’d passed, one gesture yet endures; Each turned and waved his hand as if to say, “Well, help yourself to Egypt” – “India’s yours,” And so continued grandly on his way; And as they went, one feels that, truth to tell, They understood each other pretty well.
Probably, today, this would be read as a withering indictment of English colonial arrogances but Stewart has a much gentler attitude to social interactions and his interest in meetings is one of the things that stops these poems of achievers having a megalomaniac element to them. The most famous of Stewart’s meeting poems is, of course, “Terra Australis”, though this is an imagined meeting. William Lane, travelling east to South America to establish a socialist community runs into Pedro de Quiros travelling west in the search of a Catholic paradise. Both are dead of course when they meet but there is a great deal of serious good humour about their attempts at transcending ordinary humanity. My favourite of these meetings is “Mungo Park” where that indefatigable (not to say psychotically driven) traveller finds himself conversing with Sir Walter Scott, an equally indefatigable writer. This is based on a real friendship though the facts have been fettled a little. When Park and Scott were friends it was comparatively early in the writer’s career, long before the bankruptcy of 1825 after which Scott set himself the task of writing himself out of debt, a demanding situation. In the poem, Scott belittles himself as a mere scribbler and says that he envies Park his life of hair-raising adventures – “and would that I could go”. To which Park replies:
“Each to his trade, and mine’s to walk, Sir Walter; Yet in the countries never seen by men Who’s paid the greater price, who’s gone the further, I with my travels, you with your midnight pen? My road lies far; yet it could be, my friend, In mile on mile we go or book and book We take the same strange journey in the end. What can we do but wish each other luck?” . . .
I suppose it should be included in any study of what Stewart felt about his own creativity but at least it states the idea that poetic creation is a voyage into the dark country, a “strange journey”.
Related to creativity is the portrait of the engineer (and grandfather of the novelist) Robert Stevenson. “Bell Rock” is the last poem of this Selected and belongs to the small group of poems written after the publication of Stewart’s Collected Poems in 1967. I don’t know if he wrote any poems between “Bell Rock” (written before 1973 when the Selected was first published) and his death in 1985, but this may well have been his last poem, certainly his last to be published in book form. Its subject is the perilous building of a lighthouse on the notorious Bell Rock off the coast from Dundee in Scotland, a rock responsible for the wrecks of a staggering number of ships. Begun in 1807, it took three years to build and is a tribute to human resourcefulness, flexibility and perseverance: very much the things admired by Stewart in his catalogue of achievers.
So in the sea’s long sparkle of blue and silver Back to the shore came Stevenson, and thought: There then, it’s done, and may no wave knock it over For out of all fear, all thunder, confusion and doubt One thing is accomplished, aye, to the best of my power, And there in the wind’s teeth I have built my tower. And built it, too, so now in my mind it seems, Out of foam and wave-tops, cries of gulls in the wind, Snatches of storm and sunlight, like a tower of dreams; For how except in some fairyland of the mind Could man have built it where no tower could be Standing and flashing out in the naked sea? . . .
“I have built my tower” – it’s almost impossible not to read this last poem allegorically as a valediction reflecting on a life lived writing, making things to the best of the poet’s abilities out of snatches of odds and ends – foam, gulls’ cries, storm and sunlight. There are difficulties of course: a lighthouse is not a collected poems and it, unlike poetry, is built with the sole purpose of saving lives, elegant though it may be. I think “Bell Rock” is an example, like “The Cricket”, of a resonant allegory, one where readers are invited to make connections but never connections on a one-for-one basis. It would conflict with Stewart’s wry modesty to make heroic, Yeatsian claims for his work but it puts the building of a lighthouse alongside his poetic career, so to speak.
Perhaps the most loved of these poems about an individual’s achievements is “B Flat”, worth quoting in full for any readers who do not know it:
Sing softly, Muse, the Reverend Henry White Who floats through time as lightly as a feather Yet left one solitary gleam of light Because he was the Selborne naturalist’s brother And told him how on warm summer eves When moonlight filled all Fyfield to the brim And yearning owls were hooting to their loves On church and barn and oak tree’s leafy limb He took a common half-a-crown pitch-pipe Such as the masters used for harpsichords And through the village trod with silent step Measuring the notes of those melodious birds And found that each one sang, or rather hooted, Precisely in the measure of B flat. And that is all that history has noted; We know no more of Henry White than that. So, softly, Muse, in harmony and conformity Pipe up for him and all such gentle souls Thus in the world’s enormousness, enormity, So interested in music and in owls; For though we cannot claim his crumb of knowledge Was worth much more than virtually nil Nor hail him for vast enterprise or courage, Yet in my mind I see him walking still With eager ear beneath his clerical hat Through Fyfield village sleeping dark and blind, Oh surely as he piped his soft B flat The most harmless, the most innocent of mankind.
In a sense, Gilbert White’s brother is the opposite of those who were able to split the atom or build lighthouses but he is representative of those who appear just once in history before passing into oblivion. “B Flat” is also an interesting poem interpretively because Stewart mentioned in a note (I think it appears in a selection of his work in the Poets on Record series run by UQP) that he wrote it on the day that war broke out between the two largest countries on earth – a little dollop of context that affects our reading profoundly. Fortunately, the “war” between India and China turned out to be a brief border skirmish in the Himalayas, but it highlights the virtues of souls such as Henry White. In fact, conceptually, the poem is a parody of epic verse, beginning with a formal request to the Muse but instead of asking her to sing of the wrath of Achilles or the doings of that man of many turnings, Odysseus, she is asked to sing “softly” of an eighteenth century minister. A further point to be made involves the title which I read as a comic recommendation by Stewart to himself and perhaps other poets tempted to aim for a high style: be flat. And, as part of this joke, the poem has some very flat passages, possibly to make the point: “For though we cannot claim his crumb of knowledge / Was worth much more than virtually nil”. Not exactly McGonagall but nearly in the same territory.
Finally, I’d like to look at a small poem which isn’t included in this Selected but which might shed some light on Stewart’s sense of his poetry and even on its current fate. “Flying Crooked”
It was a shy poetic person Wandering zigzag through his garden Who saw how just by flying crooked, Rather from habit than from fear, The butterfly defeats the wicked; The peewee marked it in the air But when it dived down sharp and fierce The butterfly was somewhere else. And laughed to think that even now When critics perch on every bough To pounce, to murder and dissect, They may not catch what they expect And poetry still may flutter free From Dr Peewee, Ph. D.
This is a poem paying homage to a rather more famous one, Robert Graves’s “Flying Crooked”.
The butterfly, a cabbage-white, (His honest idiocy of flight) Will never now, it is too late, Master the art of flying straight, Yet has – who knows so well as I? - A just sense of how not to fly: He lurches here and here by guess And God and hope and hopelessness. Even the aerobatic swift Has not his flying-crooked gift.
I used to think that it was a piece of plagiarism and that that was the reason for its omission from the Selected but I now think that by using the same title, Stewart establishes that his is a polite, almost deferential, variation on a given theme. Graves’s poem is interesting because what looks to be no more than a “filler” – “who knows so well as I?” – is actually crucial to the way we read the poem, helping us to realise that it is an expression of one of Graves’s long-held distinctions between the way the “poetic” mind thinks and the way a “prose” one does. And this isn’t a case of a poet sniping at prose writers because Graves knew a lot about what goes on when prose is written, having written so much of it himself. The opposition is thus rather more complex than it is in Stewart’s poem where the opponents are separated: poet vs Academic. Choosing a peewee rather than, say, a magpie, a kookaburra or a currawong enables Stewart to satirize his opponent – poetry’s opponent – as something small, but it does touch on what was happening during Stewart’s career that may have suggested that his poetry faced a bleak future.
Of course, there’s no shortage of poets finding the academic study of literature to be destructive of all the issues that matter in poetry, but in Stewart’s case, I think there is a specific danger. For Stewart – looked at literary-historically – is the last of what might be called a journalistic tradition in Australia: not “journalistic” in the sense that the poetry is akin to journalism but in the sense that journalism was where a poet would find an income-generating home. After the war, the growth of an expanded and more flexible academic environment meant that poets like Hope, McAuley and, a little later, Buckley, could earn their keep as literature academics. As Australian Literature grew, in the sixties, to be a reputable area of literary studies more poets could expect to find homes there. This academic tradition did not look too kindly on the journalistic group of which The Bulletin was the last grand survivor. Vincent Buckley, as early as the fifties, wrote an essay criticising what he saw as the lack of intellectual sophistication of the “Bulletin School”. (“Lack of intellectual sophistication” is a very crude compression of Buckley’s position and anybody who wants to follow the issue with more care and in more detail is recommended to look both at Buckley’s Essays in Poetry Mainly Australian and the relevant pages in John McLaren’s excellent biography of Buckley). At any rate, in the small world of Australian poetry, this shift towards academia is quite an earthquake and put Stewart both as poet and editor, in a vulnerable position. There is also the fact that the urbane Stewart was, in poetry, prose and personal manners, a long way from the rather hothouse, Cold War world of Catholic intrigues which Buckley seemed to inhabit. In his memoir, Cutting Green Hay, Buckley describes his taking over of the poetry editorship of The Bulletin as a kind of regretted responsibility, foisted on him by other poets, desperate that, though a poetry section was doomed under the new management, he might be able to keep it going longer than anybody else. I’m always remember, when reading this account, Gibbon’s comment that, according to Livy, the Romans conquered the whole world in their own defence!
Stewart’s Collected Poems was published in 1967, shortly before another seismic shift in Australian poetry, the arrival of the “generation of 68”, another group unlikely to be impressed by a poet whose work was formed in a time that seemed almost incomprehensible. While the 1930s were obsessed by cultural nationalism in various forms, these younger poets wanted the influx of foreign poetries, especially from America. Stewart, after leaving The Bulletin, took up an editorial position at Angus and Robertson a press which, in the 1970s when younger poets were exploring different methods of book publishing, seemed like the main bastion of the old guard. Looked at in these broad perspectives, you can get some sense of why Stewart’s poetry might be marginalised though it hardly excuses his omission from anthologies claiming a broader perspective on the history of Australian poetry. Finally, there is the ongoing reception, in reviews and critical essays of his work. Vivian Smith’s long essay on Australian poetry in The Oxford History of Australian Literature of 1981 has one of the best and most appreciative evaluations of Stewart’s work, but the book itself is often seen as a very conservative (and Sydney-oriented) one. More revealing is Judith Wright’s Preoccupations in Australian Poetry, published in 1965 which looks in considerable detail and the history and themes of Australian poetry from the beginning to the post war “Bulletin School”. The entire work, which finds space for a chapter on the poetry of Hugh McCrae, barely mentions Stewart and certainly doesn’t look at his poetry, relegating him to being nothing more than a late avatar of the vitalist tradition.
