'That poetry is implicated with politics is incontrovertible. As Theodore Adorno writes ‘art exists in the real world and has a function in it, and the two are connected by a large number of mediating links.’ Those mediating links however, the things that connect each to the other, are harder to grapple with. What does the daily life of a protest poet look like compared to a conservative one when both work in a modern university? What poetry does the politician read?' (Introduction)
Epigraph:
The aim of the writer should be as a social interpreter, his realism the realism of the people working, fighting, living and struggling. For a long period, the progressive Australian writer found very little outlet for his work. Literary Australian journals were too busy arguing over the pros and cons of art for arts sake, that outworn hobby horse, to realise that world events were booting in their ivory castles.
— Dorothy Hewett