'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.' (Introduction)
