Cirrus@Austlit

Discusses Brennan's understanding of the significance of French poet Stephane Mallarme as a poet and in poetry. While examining Mallarme's poetic theory and practice, Weinfield argues that Brennan's prescience in regard to Mallarme surpasses his own poetic capacities, but it had a 'deep and abiding impact upon subsequent Australian literature' (11).

A general discussion of Hope's themes and techniques in his poetry, and of responses to them.

In comparing it with Eliot's The Waste Land and other modernist texts, Barnes discusses the question of modernism in Brennan's work.

'This essay poses some questions about the twentieth-century's experience of the longing for Epic, and a concomitant discursive style which was traditionally characteristic of Epic, as for other long poems. I shall ask those questions in terms of shared attitudes to a traditional Western European classical heritage in what used to be called the translation studii, the passage from one location, one language, to another. In this movement, this translation from one place to another, I shall consider location, location, location, comparing the voices and choices of A. D. Hope and Derek Walcott in order to test some of our literary-critical, and perhaps also social, assumptions about those longings, those locations, those attitudes' (60).

The article traces the complex textual history and development of Brennan's poem 'Vigil', examines its Gnostic content and its manifold allusions, and looks at its position within Brennan's oeuvre.

Castro reflects on his situation as a writer of diverse ethnic background in Australia.