Book contents
- The Cambridge Companion to Australian Poetry
- The Cambridge Companion to Australian Poetry
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Chronology
- Introduction
- Part I Change and Renewal
- Part II Networks
- Part III Authors
- 9 High Delicate Outline
- 10 Burning Sappho
- 11 Les Murray
- 12 Lionel Fogarty’s Poetics of Address and the Negative Lyric
- Part IV Embodied Poetics
- Part V Expanding Form
- Further Reading
- Index
- Cambridge Companions To …
- References
11 - Les Murray
Ancient and Modern
from Part III - Authors
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 June 2024
Edited by
Book contents
- The Cambridge Companion to Australian Poetry
- The Cambridge Companion to Australian Poetry
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Chronology
- Introduction
- Part I Change and Renewal
- Part II Networks
- Part III Authors
- 9 High Delicate Outline
- 10 Burning Sappho
- 11 Les Murray
- 12 Lionel Fogarty’s Poetics of Address and the Negative Lyric
- Part IV Embodied Poetics
- Part V Expanding Form
- Further Reading
- Index
- Cambridge Companions To …
- References
Summary
The chapter attends to Les Murray’s fusion of ancient and modern frameworks, forms and, subject matter. It provides an analysis of “The Buladelah-Taree Holiday Cycle” in light of his desire to draw together the three strands he viewed as shaping Australian culture: Aboriginal, rural, and urban. The chapter also discusses Murray’s formal inventiveness and comic playfulness with language, and his interest in the relationship between poetry and the divine. The chapter reads Murray’s self-definition as an outsider in light of his valuing of a pastoral-georgic tradition and a focus on subjects and settings beyond the metropolitan. The chapter argues that while Murray engaged with the vernacular and was anti-modernist in outlook, his style is, nevertheless, sophisticated and neo-modernist in its technical innovation.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge Companion to Australian Poetry , pp. 183 - 196Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2024
References
Alexander, Neal. Late Modernism and the Poetics of Place. Edinburgh University Press, 2022.Google Scholar
Berndt, Ronald M. “A ‘Wonguri-Mandjikai Song Cycle of the Moon-Bone.’” Oceania vol.19 no.1, 1948, pp. 16–50.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Coetzee, J. M. “The Angry Genius of Les Murray.” The New York Review of Books, 29 September 2011. www.nybooks.com/articles/2011/09/29/angry-genius-les-murray/.Google Scholar
Dixon, Robert. “Two Versions of Australian Pastoral: Les Murray and William Robinson.” Imagining Australia: Literature and Culture in the New World, edited by Ryan, Judith and Wallace-Crabbe, Chris. Harvard University Committee on Australian Studies, 2004, pp. 286–304.Google Scholar
Dunk, Jonathan. “The Stump: Looking Back on the Republic of Murray.” Overland, 7 June 2019. https://overland.org.au/2019/06/the-stump-looking-back-on-the-republic-of-murray/.Google Scholar
Edney, Sue and Somervell, Tess. “Introduction.” Georgic Literature and the Environment: Working Land, Reworking Genre, edited by Edney, Sue and Somervell, Tess, Routledge, 2022, pp. 1–9.Google Scholar
Fairer, David. “‘Where Fuming Trees Refresh the Thirsty Air’: The World of Eco-Georgic.” Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture no.40, 2011, pp. 201–18.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Greene, Roland and Cushman, Stephen, eds. The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, 4th ed., Princeton University Press, 2012.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Leer, Martin. “‘This Country Is My Mind’: Les Murray’s Poetics of Place.” The Poetry of Les Murray: Critical Essays, edited by Hergenhan, Laurie and Ross, Bruce Clunies. University of Queensland Press, 2001, pp. 15–42.Google Scholar
Malouf, David. “Some Volumes of Selected Poems of the 1970s, II.” Australian Literary Studies vol.10 no.3, 1982, pp. 300–10.Google Scholar
Perrett, Bill. “Les A Murray and the ‘Aboriginal Way.’” Meridian vol.7 no.1, 1988, pp. 73–79.Google Scholar
Pollnitz, Christopher. “Folie, Topography and Family in Murray’s Middle-Distance Poems.” The Poetry of Les Murray: Critical Essays, edited by Hergenhan, Laurie and Ross, Bruce Clunies. University of Queensland Press, 2001, pp. 43–63.Google Scholar
Rowe, Noel. “Justice, Sacrifice and the Mother’s Poem.” The Poetry of Les Murray: Critical Essays, edited by Hergenhan, Laurie and Ross, Bruce Clunies. University of Queensland Press, 2001, pp. 142–56.Google Scholar
Sayre, Laura. “‘How/to Make Fields Fertile’: Ecocritical Lessons from the History of Virgil’s Georgics in Translation.” Ecocriticism, Ecology, and the Cultures of Antiquity, edited by Schliephake, Christopher. Lexington Books, 2016, pp. 175–95.Google Scholar
Tink, Amanda. “Les Murray Said His Autism Shaped His Poetry.” The Conversation, 23 August 2022. https://theconversation.com/les-murray-said-his-autism-shaped-his-poetry-his-late-poems-offer-insights-into-his-creative-process-188212.Google Scholar