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Mallarmé réchauffé

by
October 2009, no. 315

Australian Literature and the Symbolist Movement by John Hawke

University of Wollongong Press, $36.95 pb, 176 pp

Mallarmé réchauffé

by
October 2009, no. 315

In one of Kenneth Slessor’s surviving notebooks now held in the National Library, there is a curious entry consisting of approximately eighty names. This appears to be a list of those people the poet counted as friends over his lifetime; many of the names are marked in pencil with the forlorn abbreviation ‘d’. What might a literary historian make of such a list? It might be evidence of a romantic sensibility, a sign of Slessor’s faith in the commemorative powers of language, arguably the precondition for writing elegiac poetry. On the other hand, the list might be held up as proof of a bleak modernism, indicative of Slessor’s existential anxiety, the names being little more than fragments shored against the ruins of time. Of course, the question of whether a particular poet should be regarded as a romantic or a modernist depends entirely on what is meant by those loaded terms. This is one of the pitfalls of literary history: its basic terms of inquiry are often equivocal.

Australian Literature and the Symbolist Movement

Australian Literature and the Symbolist Movement

by John Hawke

University of Wollongong Press, $36.95 pb, 176 pp

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