Down the road between the promise and the freaky now: understanding the new Australian poetry

© 2007 Dr. William James FoxThe thesis closely analyses the earliest work of eleven Australian poets who came to prominence in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s — the era of the “Generation of 1968” or “The New Australian Poetry”. In comparatively critiquing the earliest volumes of these poets, this study identifies the attitudinal, stylistic, and conceptual common denominators that lead to the recognition and categorization of this group of writers as a unique “generation” in Australian literary history. These artistic common denominators are identifies as including qualities such as aesthetic self-reflexiveness, anti-lyricism, anti-Romanticism, and a generally antagonistic and sceptical attitude towards the accepted historical role and function of the poet and poetry. The thesis takes particular account of the early work and editorial foresight of John Tranter in collecting the work of his contemporaries in his The New Australian Poetry anthology of 1979. A large amount of analytical weight is given over to exploration of Tranter’s earliest volumes in an effort to underscore the contemporary impact and relevance of his conceptual concerns. In establishing that the work of the New Australian Poets is marked by a set of recurring attitudes towards literature and the poetic statute, the thesis moves to theoretically situate these attitudes in between an anxious, fast-paced version of Modernism and a horizon of Postmodern promise. In arguing thus as to the specific theoretical location and categorisation of the work of this group of poets, the study aims to make a contribution to the twentieth-century narrative of Australian literary history. Perhaps more importantly, the thesis aims to clarify precisely what it was about the work of these poets that made their initial artistic breakthrough so controversial and confronting