The Postponement of Judgment

On the last day of the Melbourne Writers’ Festival, I attended a session titled ‘Hope and Wright Remembered’, a presentation intended as a memorial for those two well-known figures of Australian poetry, A.D. Hope and Judith Wright. For a panel on poetry, it was exceptionally well attended, the Merlyn Theatre being nearly full. I had the impression that the session would be one of two things: either a commemoration ceremony for the recently departed, in which those left behind would eulogise the Great Man and the Great Woman, or it would be a chance for criticism in both its affirmative and condemnatory modes, a chance to make claims either for or against the poets’ work. Chris Wallace-Crabbe and Evan Jones spoke on Hope, Gig Ryan and Fiona Capp on Wright. They didn’t venture to suggest that extraordinary importance could be attached to the names of either of the poets. This was despite the implications of the context and, what I took to be, the expectation of the audience. (Perhaps the speakers intended to avoid a laudatory tone?) With the exception of Wallace-Crabbe’s eloquent contribution, the writers’ presentations lacked broad literary context. Jones’s and Capp’s speeches were personal reminiscences. Gig Ryan, in contrast, spoke on Wright from a baldly political point of view, drawing attention both to Wright’s interest in the cause of land rights and her opposition to the exploitation of Nature. Ryan connected the fact that Wright could not inherit the property of her family, due to her being female, with her concern with White Australian alienation and the dispossession of the Aboriginal peoples. Through the session I was surprised by the oblique approach that was taken. The speakers didn’t proclaim the importance of the two poets to either the tradition of Australian poetry or world poetry in unanimous terms – Wallace-Crabbe had indicated that Hope had made him aware that modern literature could be written about suburban experience, and Capp had suggested that Wright, a famous, living woman writer, had been a role-model for her. Once the presentations were concluded, Jason Steger, the literary editor of The Age, asked the panel whether they thought the poets could be considered great. There was hesitation. Ryan responded that he thought it was too soon to make that sort of claim. Capp added that, while she wasn’t sure that they could be considered great as yet, Wright was great to her. What was going on? It seemed to me that the claim for the poets’ greatness was implicit in the context, in the fact that there was a session dedicated solely to them and in that it was so well attended. But why then had the claim for their importance, for their centrality to a tradition, while admittedly not being dismissed, definitely been avoided? Was this an Australian reticence, a concern to avoid cultivating ‘tall poppies’? Why the avoidance of making a serious case either for or against? And why Ryan’s belief that posterity would determine their significance? While not wishing to make too much of that particular occasion, as it mightn’t have been the best context for the type of discussion I was expecting, it did prompt me to think that the deferral of authority occurring there, excusable as it may have been so soon after those writers’ deaths, is characteristic of much talk about poetry and, by extension, much Australian poetry criticism. Too seldom is a sufficiently in-depth argument presented in the attempt to justify statements made about the poetry. Often the debate about poetry takes place anecdotally, and too often serious disagreements over the politics and the philosophy of language are left as disagreements of mere opinion. This lack of commitment to dialogue about literature in the languages of criticism and philosophy, or in the languages of religion and history, leads to exploitation of various kinds. When Ryan, the poetry editor of The Age and judge of The Age poetry prize, responded to Steger’s question by saying that it is too soon to know whether Judith Wright is a great poet, I wondered how that act of postponement may be related to its opposite, to a claim made in the present, and how a claim made in the future might differ from one made in the present. Could they really be different? Surely all depend on the merits of interested and interesting arguments? It might be that postponement is evasion. It might be that that evasion evinces an insecurity which is a product of the tenuous hold on critical authority that is too common. It might also be a trace of the belief that actual evaluative judgment comes from elsewhere. To many readers this might sound too high-minded, too critical of what is simply a question of opinion, of taste, that is, of subjectivity. To that kind of response I would reply that it too, needs to be considered and, I would add, that unless thinkers concern themselves with those understandings which ‘frame’ the discussions about validity, importance and quality little of lasting worth can actually be said in the public realm. This phenomenon of postponement is a major hindrance to those writers who, like Wright and, perhaps, Hope, have taken pains to consider the fundamental issues of their art form. It seems to me, and this may be the reason for her popularity, that Judith Wright is one of a number of Australian poets who have thought philosophically and politically about language, experience and culture. In doing so she made strong and clear statements about it. Whenever I read her poem, ‘Gum Trees Stripping’, I find myself thinking on the crucial role that picturing performs in Australian culture and I am also drawn to thinking about how the preoccupation of that poem, that particularly Australian interest in the hiatus between the seeing and naming of the natural world, is also enacted in the work of more recent poets. That is not to say that Judith Wright is greater than Francis Webb or Kenneth Slessor or – could it be more ironic? – ‘Ern Malley’. Rather, it is to suggest that the connections established in my mind between that poem and, say, the poetry of Robert Gray, indicate that her interests are especially pertinent and still relevant, and that is what is valuable to me as someone concerned with this literary tradition. It is through the craft of the writing and its depth of relevance that poetry engages readers. Unless the philosophic aspects of both the technicalities of writing and the process of its reception are constantly attended to by Australian critics and poets, the representatives of Australian literature are inevi&shy;tably going to find themselves decreasingly relevant to practis&shy;ing writers and serious readers. The only effective response to this kind of dissolution, this loss of faith in the discussion of ideas and the resulting postponement of judgment, is engagement. In Australia at present we need more, and more attentive, in-depth criticism. We need critics who don’t simply wish to provide an overview of the literature in which they are interested. We need critics who are actively engaged in investigating and elucidating the poetics of the writing and who wish to talk about the relationship between language and their life. (Incidentally, both Wright and Hope were notable critics in this regard.) Unless more attention is given to the role of well-argued criticism, as opposed to ‘timeline’ historical accounts, Australian poetry will continue to depend on judgments that have been made elsewhere. Instead of being able to claim that Judith Wright is an important Australian poet whose views and whose language resonates with us, we, those of us concerned with the experience of poetry in Australia, will be left impassive, hesitant, saying that she must have been important because she was an activist and because she once won the Queen’s Medal for Poetry.

John Mateer

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