The material on this page is available to AustLit subscribers. If you are a subscriber or are from a subscribing organisation, please log in to gain full access. To explore options for subscribing to this unique teaching, research, and publishing resource for Australian culture and storytelling, please contact us or find out more.
'In my part of the world, just outside Melbourne, the earth’s rebirth has begun. This is not news, of course, nor is it the resurrection of nature, but merely awakening from the winterlong sleep. We use the word merely in its sense of time, not significance. The earth and its attendant branches of family are blooming into beauty.'
'In Australia, August is Poetry Month. In the United States, it is celebrated in April, the spring month with its rich poetic association with spring. Apparently April was chosen, however, because it was the best month for promotion as well as for celebration. The imperatives to promote and to celebrate stand in some tension. Poets and lovers of poetry may long to return to the golden age of poetry early in the twentieth century when every newspaper and magazine regularly published poems and had poetry editors. The name of the poet laureate was known throughout the land. Poets, too, were seen to embody and to help shape the national spirit. Rupert Brooke in the early days of the 1914 war, for example, and Wilfred Owen at its ending. Or Osip Mandelstam and Anna Akhmatova in Russia, where Stalin feared poets despite their lack of battalions. '
