Pastoral poetry

This essay offers a consideration of what I take to be the convention of 'metaphysical' pastoral in Australian poetry, together with some speculation as to…

Within the sequence of The Idyll Wheel (1989) Les Murray brought to a close the mythic journey of 'home-coming', which had sustained much of his…

Vivian Smith's poetry occupies an ambiguous position in Australian literature: it is highly regarded, but intermittently discussed. Perhaps some critics continue to find Smith's formalism…

Among poetic forms, the elegy has best survived the twentieth century's antiformalist thrust. However, as Jahan Ramazani demonstrates in Poetry of Mourning, modern elegy…

Why pastoral indeed. Why should what Paul Alpers calls a ‘notoriously conventional’ (79) form of imaginative expression be attracting the interest of writers and scholars…

This essay explores possible connections between modern scientific investigation of nature and the portrayal of affective communities in King Lear and Paradise Lost.

Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost (1594–1595) engages with ideas intrinsic to pastoral, particularly the notion of retreat from central urbanity to an alternative space, and the…

In Wordsworth’s Salisbury Plain (1793–94) and Adventures on Salisbury Plain (1795–99) the poet’s sense of the congruence of human mind and nature is aligned to…