Cirrus@Austlit

'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. '