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.
'When I was younger and perhaps more arrogant, I could speak confidently of modern poetry and its defects. My listeners rightly pointed out that I hadn’t read many ‘modern poets’ and was in no position to pontificate. Underlying that exchange — and any discussion of poetry, even one grounded in ignorance — are the deeper and not fully answerable questions of what poetry is and why so many human beings write it. The answers to that question will be many, but common to most is the conviction that through poetry and other forms of art we seek to represent something more, something deeper, something longed for, in our world than we can reach through more discursive or analytical forms of writing. That ‘something more’ may be envisaged as lying beyond the world of our experience, lying within it, or refined from it.' (Introduction)
