'Elegiac poems by Australian late modernist poet Martin Johnston (1947–90) expose key anxieties about lyric poetry after American mid-century late modernism. Johnston, like other of his contemporaries, experimented with elegy in order to rethink the lyric in ways conscious of innovative mid-century and post-1960s developments from American poetry. Johnston’s discomfort with elegy and the elegiac tradition, and his subsequent effort to expand upon the concept of the dead poet since romanticism using social poetics, illuminate wider tendencies in late modernist poetics shared with other Australian peers. This essay insists that the late modernist question of social poetics can be studied via the tentative process the antipodean poet Johnston adopts in his complex relationship to elegiac lyric.' (Publication abstract)
