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POETRY
The vitality of Australian verse can be traced through the changing profiles of anthologies, where most readers encounter the poems they remember
100 Australian Poems You Need to Know
Edited by Jamie Grant
Hardie Grant, 224pp, $39.95 (HB)
The Penguin Anthology of Australian Poetry
Edited by John Kinsella
Penguin, 480pp, $35
IN his introduction to the 1935 anthology The Poet's Tongue, W.H. Auden argues that the best poetry bears the characteristics of "memorable speech":
That is to say, it must move our emotions, or excite our intellect, for only that which is moving or exciting is memorable, and the stimulus is the audible spoken word and cadence, to which we must surrender, as we do when talking to an intimate friend.
Auden's claim is often evoked, because of its felt veracity. A poem learned by heart at school might linger in one's memory, like a burr on an old sock, for years, decades or more; an intimate friend indeed. Critic Martin Duwell, introducing the inaugural Best Australian Poetry (2003), suggested that poetry anthologies are "underestimated phenomena" because "for most of us they, rather than books by individual authors, are the first place where we meet the poems that become important to us throughout our lives".
This year marks the 100th anniversary of the publication of the first comprehensive poetry anthology in Australia, The Golden Treasury of Australian Verse, edited by Bertram Stevens. In his introduction, Stevens charts the first 100 or so years of Australian poetic output since European settlement, while surveying the publications of the 19th century that comprised a poetic forum: newspapers and periodicals . The most important of these was, of course, The Bulletin, 128 years old at its demise last year, though not yet 30 when Stevens was writing in 1909.
As we near the end of the first decade of a new century, it is possible to appraise contemporary developments in the Australian poetry anthology in the context of its first 100 years, particularly the past 40. Two trends are detectable, each of which takes up where the 20th century left off: the anthology's evolution as a mode of market survival and its cultivation of post-nationalist temper. To understand the roots of both, it is necessary to look at...