Critical discussion of Australian poetry has long been preoccupied by the status of its modernism, as a function of wider questions regarding the meaning of Australian modernity. Was modernism only belatedly taken up in the 1970s, or were certain older Australian poets modernist avant la lettre? In this unit students will evaluate a selection of key poems and statements about poetry by Australian writers from 1900 to the present, taking in themes such as: Romantic absence and negativity, the Symbolist inheritance, high and vernacular modernisms, avant gardism and reaction, the Generation of 68, and the fate of postmodernism.
