Author's Foreword: ... It seemed to me convenient to group what remained of the poems from my first two books, Green Lions and The White Cry, under the heading "Early New Zealand Poems"; and it was tempting to place with those, as I have done, a few nostalgic poems about my native land written during my first two or three years in Sydney: chiefly the title poem from "Elegy for an Airman" (1940) and "The River" (which was originally entitled "The Waingongoro", only nobody in Australia could pronounce that) which made its appearance in book form as late as 1946 in The Dosser in Springtime - however I think it was written some years before that. ...
One natural but disturbing result of omitting these wartime poems was, I discovered, that the selection then began to give the impression that the vast historical events of our time had made no impact on me at all: which was far from the truth. For this reason, among others, I have included a poem called 'The Breaking Wave' which does mention that there were such things as bombers and submarines disturbing our peace of mind; ..I suppose that on the whole my reaction to the violence of our time has been chiefly expressed, by image and implication, in the verse plays and Glencoe.
Partly for that reason, and partly because I do not think that in their merits and defects, they can reasonably be separated from the rest of my poetry, I have included here extracts from each of the plays. ... Finally, the selection is more up to date than either the Collected Poems or the small Selected Poems in the Australian Poet series. (v-vi).
'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)
'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)
