Here's To Charles Harper(1817-1868) and Walter Brennan

[RonPrice]

Bush Poets and Tangential Bush Poets: Shapers of Our Time
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SOLITARY SHAPING

There was an uncertainty and tentativeness in the early attempts at literary expression in Australia Leonie Kramer, noted Australian public figure and academic, informs us.1  That sense of historical moment and newness which one finds in many other countries was not found downunder.  The first poet, Charles Harper(1817-1868), was what Kane calls a “solitary shaper,” but he did not have any central point of reference as he lay the foundation for an Australian poetry. His interests were broad and complex, his search was for philosophic and religious truth.–Ron Price with thanks to Paul Kane, Australian Poetry: Romanticism and Negativity, Cambridge UP, 1996, p.17.

With Walter Brennan, who began to write poetry seriously in 1891, we have a poet who should be evaluated as the architect of a single poem not a series of poems.  He saw  all poetry as “a history of mankind’s dream of the Absolute.”1 Poetry, to Brennan, was an expression of an aspiration for a pitch of experience denied in ordinary life. –Ron Price with thanks to G.A.Wilkes, “Christopher Brennan,” The Literature of Australia, G. Dutton, editor, Ringwood, p. 307.

Well, you could say these were
thoughts about Australian poetry
before the crisis began to mount. 
Much more could be said, but I
find here my spirit-home feeling.
 
It took me thirty years not so much(1)
of tentativeness or uncertainty but
of the solitary shaping of myself,
the finding of a voice suited to
some inner prompting and urge
to match the historical moments
and pervasive newnesses around
me that dizzying whirl, booming
and buzzing in confusion of it all.

1 1962 to 1992: thirty years of some mysterious solitary shaping, of finding a voice that seemed mine.  “Thus began that bent of mind from which I could not deviate….that of turning into an image, into a poem, everything that delighted or troubled me.” Ernst Cassirir, Symbol, Myth and Culture: Essays and Lectures of Ernst Cassirir: 1935-1945, ed. D. P. Verene, Yale UP, 1979, pp. 209-210.

Ron Price
4 March 2007

[Ric Raftis]

G'day Ron,

Welcome to the site.

[RonPrice]

Thanks Ric. I won't be able to get to this site that often, but on occasion.-Ron

[manfredvijars]

Hi Ron, and Welcome to the site ....

(slight correction?)
HARPUR, CHARLES (1813-1868), poet and critic, was born on 23 January 1813, at Windsor on the Hawkesbury (http://www.adb.online.anu.edu.au/biogs/A010472b.htm)

Do you think that Charles Harpur set out to lay the foundation for an Australian poetry? Given that interests were broad and complex could he have merely recorded his thoughts and explored them on paper?

Then again, was he talking about himself in "Australia's First Great Poet"? ... 

With Respect,

Manfred

PS. can't seem to find anything on Walter Brennan .. can you enlighten us further?
PPS. Folks, if you thought TMFSR was long; take a read of "The Creek of the Four Graves"



MODERN POETRY
by Charles Harpur

How I hate those modern Poems
   Vaguer, looser than a dream!
Pointless things that look like proems
   Only, to some held-back theme!
Wild unequal, agitated,
As by steam ill-regulated -
   Balder-dashie steam!
And if (in fine) not super-lyrical,
Then vapid, almost to a miracle.
---

[zondrae]

Manfred,
I know I lack proper education, but the only WB I know is the old yankee actor in the hillbilly overalls.

[manfredvijars]

Me too Zondrae. I think he meant ...

BRENNAN, CHRISTOPHER JOHN (1870-1932), poet and scholar, was born on 1 November 1870 in Harbour Street, Sydney

FIRE IN THE HEAVENS by Christopher Brennan

Fire in the heavens, and fire along the hills,
and fire made solid in the flinty stone,
thick-mass'd or scatter'd pebble, fire that fills
the breathless hour that lives in fire alone.

This valley, long ago the patient bed
of floods that carv'd its antient amplitude,
in stillness of the Egyptian crypt outspread,
endures to drown in noon-day's tyrant mood.

Behind the veil of burning silence bound,
vast life's innumerous busy littleness
is hush'd in vague-conjectured blur of sound
that dulls the brain with slumbrous weight, unless

some dazzling puncture let the stridence throng
in the cicada's torture-point of song.
---